The Last Days of New Paris (5 page)

Whatever their source, those devil-manifs were weak, without even the verve to fully emerge.
They're probably there still,
thinks Thibaut. Endlessly eating endless, dumb, saintly prey.

He approaches Garibaldi and boulevard Pasteur. Behind shutters he makes out the guttering of candles. These houses are tiny communes. A family in each room, stoves burning broken chairs, routes holed between walls. House-villages. Thibaut falls asleep and dreams as he trudges Haussmann's boulevards.

He dreams Élise falling toward him in blood that obscures her face. He sees Virginie, and Paul, and Jean, and the rest of them, and he is too late to do anything but cradle their dying heads in the dark of the forest.

Thibaut does not cry out but he does jolt himself awake, still walking. He sets his face back into a city sneer.

At a junction, shining in the moon's white light, there is motion, and Thibaut slows. Two skeletons. They jerk their fleshless limbs. They walk a slow circle.

Thibaut is still. The dead feet click.

Alain, the best officer his cell ever voted into place, would treat
such prim Delvaux bones, or the dens of fossils, prone Mallo skeletons shaking themselves repeatedly apart, with great respect. It had not stopped three of them jabbing him to death one humming hot June day with their own splintering matter.

Thibaut backs away. He does not want to fight manifs.

The organ in him, his new muscle, cramps at a sudden spasm of manif energy. It comes from somewhere
else.
He staggers. It comes again, so hard he doubles up.

There is a rapid cracking of shots. The skeletons do not pause. The sounds are to the north. They are away from Thibaut's route, but close, and his own insides still grip him from within, tug him, and when he runs, it is, almost to his own bewilderment, toward the firing.

Through a boundary into the seventh. His ears pop. Another shot. Thibaut smells sap.

The avenue de Breteuil is full of aspen trees. Their boughs stretch out to touch the houses. The complex of Les Invalides, that sprawling and once-opulent old military zone, is out of sight, has been overcome by millennial vegetation. Lampposts struggle up from roots and roofs from the canopy. The Cathedral of Saint-Louis des Invalides is filled with bark.
The Musée de l'Armée is being emptied, with slow, vegetable disorder, its weapons gripped and tugged over weeks out of their cases by curious undergrowth.

Another shot: a flock of night things disperses. Something laughs. A woman runs out of the forest. She wears thick glasses, tweed trousers, and jacket, all smeared with woodland muck. She labors under bags and equipment, waves a pistol.

There are growls, the snarl of breath. Beasts come rushing through the trees after her, with strange quick staggering.

They are little tables, stiff board bodies, unbending wooden legs, thrashing tails, and ferocious canine faces. They scream and bite the air. Fanged furniture jerking across the rough ground.

Thibaut hisses and steps past the stumbling woman into her pursuers' path, between them and their quarry. They'll veer from him, he thinks, as most manifs do.

But they attack. They keep coming.

He is almost too slow, in his shock, to bring up his gun. He fires as the first animal thing leaps, sends the growling table flying in an explosion of splinters.

Others hurl themselves at him, and his cotton nightclothes are suddenly as tough as metal. He swings his arms. The pajamas grip Thibaut, make him an instrument, propel him fast and hard. A wood-and-taxidermy predator reaches him, biting, and Thibaut's clothed arm comes down and snaps its spine.

He stands between the woman and the wolf-tables, snarling as bestially as the pack. The tables inch forward. With a burst of creative chance Thibaut shoots the closest right in its snarl and sends it down in blood and sawdust.

There's shouting from the forest. He can see two, three figures in the trees. SS uniforms. A man in a dark coat, calling in German.
Quick! Be careful! The dogs—

A burly officer fires right at him out of the shadows. Thibaut howls. But the shots ricochet from his chest. The soldier frowns as Thibaut brings his own rickety old rifle up and shoots and misses of course and reloads while the man still watches, stupid and slow, and Thibaut fires again, this time with
disponibilité,
and puts him down.

Wolf-tables bite. A Nazi cracks a whip, to
rally
them, to gather them, and Thibaut snatches as the leather swings. It slaps and wraps his hand and makes it numb but he grips. By him the woman drops, pushes her fingers into the topsoil: the furniture that menaces her twitches and backs away. Thibaut yanks the whip-holder toward him by
his weapon and punches him back again, sending him flying into the dark.

The Germans hesitate. The pack howls. Thibaut smacks a tree hard enough to make it quake, showing his pajama-ed strength. The attackers retreat, into the forest, back out of sight, toward the corridors of Les Invalides. The humans call as they run, and the little tables follow the sound, baring their teeth as the darkness takes them.

“Thank you,” the woman says. “Thank you.” She is gathering her fallen things. “Come on.” She speaks French with an American accent, a thin and cultured voice.

“What in hell was that?” Thibaut says. The man he just hit is dead. Thibaut goes through his pockets. “I've never seen
anything
like those things before.”

“They're called wolf-tables,” the woman says. “Manifest from an imagining by a man called Brauner. We must go.”

Thibaut stares at her. Eventually he says, “Brauner's have fox parts. Those tables were bigger than any I've seen, and their fur was more gray. They didn't look like foxes. It's as if they were crossbred. The soldiers called them ‘dogs.' And they were
doing what they were told.
And…” He looks away from her. “As I say, I've never seen any manifs, including wolf-tables, like them before.”
And they came right at
me.
They didn't hesitate.

After a moment the woman says, “Please excuse me. Of course. I misunderstood.”

“Wolf-tables are scavengers,” Thibaut goes on. “One shot should have dispersed them.” They gorge themselves, trying to fill stomachs they don't have, clogging up their throats till they vomit blood and meat and spit and then eating helplessly again. “Wolf-tables aren't brave.”

“Of
course
you know manifs,” the woman says. “I apologize. I didn't mean to be rude. But please…We have to go.”

“Who are you?”

She is a few years older than he. Her face is round with high flushed cheeks, her hair is dark and short. She looks at him from where she stoops among the roots.

“What are you doing here?” Thibaut says, and then instantly thinks he knows.

“I'm Sam,” she says. He takes her satchel. “Hey,” she says.

He upends the bag.

“What are you
doing
?” she shouts.

He scatters a camera, canisters of film, several battered books. The camera is not old. He feels no manif charge. These are not surreal objects. He stares at them. He was expecting scavenger spoils. He was expecting old gloves; a stuffed snake; things that are dusty; a wineglass half melted in lava and embedded in stone; bits of a typewriter;
a barnacled book that has rested underwater; tweezers that change what they touch.

Thibaut had thought this woman a battle junkie, a magpie of war. Artifact hunters creep past the barricades
to seek, extract, and sell stuff born or altered by the blast. Batteries of odd energies. Objects foraged out of the Nazis' quarantine, fenced for colossal sums in the black markets of the world outside. Manifs stolen while the partisans fight for liberation, while Thibaut and his comrades face down devils and fascists and errant art, and die.

He almost has more respect for his enemies than for the dealers in such goods. In the satchel Thibaut expected to find
a spoon covered with fur; a candle; a pebble in a box. He blinks. He folds and unfolds the Nazi's whip.

Sam checks the camera for damage. “What was that for?” she says.

Thibaut prods the books with his toe as though they might turn into more expected spoils. She smacks his foot away. Maps of Paris. Journals:
Minotaure; Documents; Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution; La Révolution surréaliste; View.

“Why do you have these?” he says. His voice is hushed.

The woman brushes the covers clean. “You thought I was a treasure-hunter. Jesus.” She looks at him through her camera's viewfinder and he puts his hand in front of his face. She presses the button and it clicks and he feels something in his blood. He keeps staring at her journals, thinking of those he once carried. He left them, years ago, when he took his leave of training. An odd homage to his
instructors, those spare copies, pages full of their own work.

The woman sighs with relief. “If you'd broken
this,
you and I would've been on a bad footing.”

She puts the camera strap around her neck and brushes dirt from a big leather notebook. She offers her hand.

“I'm not here to steal,” she says. “I'm here to keep a record.”

After he left his dead parents behind him, before he found those who would become his comrades, Thibaut, not yet sixteen, had hid and crept and wandered for a long time. When he reached the edge of the old city, he had secreted himself where he could see gangs of terrified, trapped citizens run, launch themselves at barricades thrown up at the perimeter of the blasted zone, from beyond which the Nazi guards fired remorseless fusillades, killing them until they understood there was no way to leave. In those first days some German soldiers, too, had run at their compatriots' positions, waving and shouting to be let across the street and out. If they came too close, they, too, were put down. Those officers and men who saw and hung back, pleading, were commanded over loudspeakers to remain within the affected radius, to await instructions.

He retreated to the unsafety of Paris. There Thibaut
slept where he could and hunted for food and wiped his eyes and hid from terrible things. He crept repeatedly back to those outskirts, though, tried to scout a way out, again and again, failed every time. The city was rigorously sealed.

At last one night under pounding rain, sheltering in the ruins of a tobacconist and leafing listlessly through his belongings, he found in his pack that last stack of pamphlets and books he had received, the day the blast had blasted. Thibaut cut the string that still bound it.

Géographie nocturne,
a pamphlet of poems. A review;
La Main à plume.
The Surrealism of those still in the occupied city. Written in resistance, under occupation. He had seen the names Chabrun, Patin, Dotrement. The rain cracked the window onto nocturnal geography.

“ ‘Those who are asleep,' ” Thibaut had read, “ ‘are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.' ”

He opened the second volume onto Chabrun's “État de présence.” That defense of poetry, antifascist rage. The statement of intent of these stay-behind faithful, that, much later, Thibaut would recite to the Main à plume selectors, to pass his entry test. A Surrealist state of presence. He riffled the pages and the first words he read were almost the document's last.

“Should we go? Stay? If you can stay, stay…”

Thibaut was shaking again and not from cold.

“We remain.”

1941

A man in a homburg hat emerged into the Place Felix Baret. He still wasn't accustomed to the quality of the noise: petrol rationing kept more and more cars from the road, and in this modern town he could hear wagon wheels and horses' hooves.

Port city, hot thug metropolis, exileville, clot of refugees, milked dry and beaten. 1941, and
France for the French.

Varian Fry, thirty-four, thin, his mouth set, with his attention and his focus, looked like what he was: a man who knew something. He squinted at the line outside the office. He'd grown used to the terrible hope he saw in those crowds.

The alleys bustled and the bars were full enough. There were yells in many languages. The mountains still watched over everything and the late spring was warm. Streets away, the sea shifted.
I should be sitting on the quay,
Fry thought.
I should be taking off my shoes and rolling up my trousers.
Throwing stones into little waves to frustrate the fish.
I should kick my shoes into the water.

He saw sellers of visas, information, lies. Marseille flushed.

A popular sign in a
boulangerie
said
Entreprise Française,
by a portrait of the lugubrious marshal. Fry took off his spectacles, as if to disallow himself a clear sight at such barbarism.

“Mess your! Mess your!”

A young man in a cheap suit ran across the square. He was mustached on a baby face, and his eyebrows were so arched they might have been plucked, though his hair did not suggest much grooming. “Mess your!” he said.

“Can I help you?” Fry said in English.

The man stopped close to him and looked suddenly sly. He muttered something Fry could not make out.
Oto, adoni,
something.

“I'm no more French than you,” Fry said. “
Is
that even French? Kindly cease torturing the poor language.”

His interlocutor blinked. “Excuse me,” he said. “I thought…I made a mistake. You're American?”

“You saw me in the consulate,” Fry said.

“Right.”

The man was almost bouncing from one foot to the other in his excitement. He glanced up at a sun like illuminated paper. He said, “That feels wrong,” and Fry was startled, because he had been thinking the same thing.

“Mr….?”

“Jack Parsons.”

“To give you the benefit of the doubt for a minute, Mr. Parsons, I'll assume you're merely naive.” Was this man a cack-handed spy? A wheeler and dealer, what the British called a spiv? “Accosting someone in the street in Marseille right now…”

“Oh, gee, I'm real sorry.” Parsons looked sincere. He couldn't have been older than twenty-three. “Here's the thing.” He spoke quickly. “I was just in there and I saw you waltz straight past the whole damn line. I'm trying to travel, see? But they laughed in my face. Told me to get back to the U.S.”

“How did you even get here?”

Parsons's eyes wandered to the
boulangerie.

“ ‘French Business?' ” he said. “That's what it says, right? What else would it be?”

“It's informing you that it's not a
Jewish
business,” Fry said. Could Parsons really be so ingenuous? In the shadows in the lee of a nearby wall was a pile of German-language newspapers. “Do you work for Bingham?”

Of all the U.S. diplomats in the city, Bingham was Fry's only ally. The others strove to keep cordial relations with Vichy. Fry, they knew, would have brought every refugee
out of France, every anti-Nazi, every Jew, every trade unionist and radical and writer and thinker forced into hiding. But he had to choose. His Emergency Rescue Committee focused, not without shame, on artists and intellectuals.

As if the baker, the sewage worker, the nursery teacher didn't deserve help, too, Fry thought, many times.

“I don't know who Bingham is,” said Parsons. “But listen. So. I'm wondering who's the swell sauntering right by the rest of us, and then I saw what you were carrying. Those papers…”

From his case Fry showed the tip of a handmade magazine he had brought to read in case of delays, a little stitched booklet. “This?” He pulled it out a little further. On its front was a hand-colored, twisted figure. Names: Ernst, Masson, Lamba, Tanning, others.

“Right! I could not believe it! I have to talk to you.”

“Ah, are you an art aficionado?” Fry said. “Is that it?”

Marseille ate the guileless. The hotels Bompard, Levant, Atlantique were internment camps, extorting funds out of refugees. The Légion des Anciens Combattants terrorized Jews and Reds. The alleys belonged to gangsters.
This Jack Parsons,
Fry thought,
is trouble, whether he means to be or not.

Fry had already had to banish Mary Jayne Gold from the ERC headquarters at Villa Air-Bel, the large dilapidated house just outside the town. He had overcome his skepticism toward a woman he first thought a wealthy
tourist play-acting, but even his nurtured respect for her hadn't been enough to keep him from asking her to leave. Her boyfriend was a liability. Raymond Couraud—his nickname, “Killer,” Mary Jayne insisted unconvincingly, a reference to his ongoing murder of the English language—was a young tough, a rage-filled deserter who hated almost all of Mary Jayne's friends, who associated with criminals, who had already broken in to the villa in what he later called a “prank,” who had stolen from Gold herself. She was bewilderingly patient.

“Be sympathetic, Varian,” Fry's friend Serge had said. “You should have known me when I was twenty.”

“Mary Jayne's
nostalgie de la boue
is her business,” Fry had said. “But we can't risk having him around.”

Fry knew he must walk away from Parsons, but the young man muttered something and somehow Fry stayed put under that sky. Parsons looked avidly at the pamphlet Fry held. The right person might cross an ocean to buy art. Might even come to a war.

“Did Peggy tell you about us?” said Fry.

“Who's Peggy?” said Parsons. “I want to talk to you about
her.
” He pointed to one name on the booklet's cover.

Fry followed his finger. “
Ithell Colquhoun?”

“Now
that
is not the kind of name you forget.”

“I don't know her, in fact,” Fry said. “Or anything about her. And I certainly don't have any of her work to sell…”

“See, I
do
know about her,” said Parsons. “And I was
not,
in a goddamn lifetime, expecting to see her name, any names I recognize, here. Which is why I want to talk to you.”

Don't discuss anything with those you don't know. The Gestapo are watching, the Kundt Commission is in town.
But there was something in Parsons's voice.

The Café Pelikan was crowded. Refugees, intellectuals, a smattering of Marseille scum.

“What do you know about Surrealism?”

Jack Parsons scratched his chin. “Art, right? Not much. Is that what she does? I know Colquhoun from kind of another context. Mr. Fry, listen.” He leaned forward. “I shouldn't be here. I'm en route to Prague.”

“You can't get to Prague,” Fry said. “I still don't know how you even made it here.”

“I just…made my way. And I have to keep going. I have a job to do. This goddamn war. It's like you said: in the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.”

Did I say that?
“I'm just a clerk…” Fry said.

“Come on. I know you run this committee. This Emergency Rescue Committee.” Fry looked quickly around them, but Parsons was unperturbed. “Everyone in the office was talking. I know you have some place in the suburbs,
and you look after people, artists, try to get them out—”

“Keep your voice down.”

“I'm going to level with you.” Parsons was gabbling. “I want to go to Prague because if I get there, there are some words I think I can make do things they wouldn't normally do. But now everyone's saying I
can't
get there. So there I am, wondering what to do, and I see you, and I see what you're carrying. And
that
is why I came running after you. Because I do not believe in coincidence.”

Fry smiled. “I have a friend who would agree,” he said. “ ‘Objective chance,' he'd call it.”

“Uh huh? See, that person in your magazine is connected to exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to do.
Ithell Colquhoun.
” He made it sound like a bell ringing. “What's your connection?”

“One of my friends knows her,” Fry said. “The one who shares your view on coincidence, in fact. She visited him last year, I believe, in Paris. It was he who made this pamphlet. I believe she's a painter and a writer. I haven't even read this yet.”

“What's your friend's name?” said Parsons. “Who made that?”

With an effort, Fry did not answer. “How do you know Colquhoun's work?” he said instead.

“A kind of mentor of mine knew her. Spoke real highly of her, too. That's why you got me excited. Here's what
I'm wondering. Like I said, there's something I wanted to do in Prague. Now I'm stuck here. But what if that's okay? This guy I got a lot of respect for, well, he has a lot of respect for Colquhoun. So if she's one of these
Surrealists,
maybe they have the same kind of ideas he does. And I do. So maybe I want to talk to
them.
To your pals.”

“My friend who knows her is called André,” said Fry, after a long silence.

“Mine's called Aleister.”

“André Breton.”

“Aleister Crowley.”