Not Safe After Dark (23 page)

The second time I met her it was raining. I was walking along the
quai
across from Notre Dame, staring distractedly at the rain pitting the river’s steely surface, thinking of her,
when she suddenly ducked under my umbrella and took my arm.

I must have gasped out loud.

‘Professor Dodgson,’ she said. Not a question. She
knew
who I was. ‘Sorry I startled you.’

But that wasn’t why I gasped, I wanted to tell her. It was the sudden apparition of this beautiful creature I had been dreaming about for days. I looked at her. The driving rain had soaked
her hair and face. Like Dick in
Tender Is the Night
, I wanted to drink the rain that ran from her cheeks. ‘How did you recognize me under this?’ I asked her.

She gave that little shrug that was no more than a ripple and smiled up at me. ‘Easy. You’re carrying the same old briefcase you had last week. It’s got your initials on
it.’

‘How sharp of you,’ I said. ‘You should become a detective.’

‘Oh, I could never become a fascist pig.’ She said this with a completely straight face. People said things like that back then.

‘Just a joke,’ I said. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere special.’

‘Coffee?’

She looked at me again, chewing on her lower lip for a moment as she weighed up my invitation. ‘All right,’ she said finally. ‘I know a place.’ And her gentle pressure on
my arm caused me to change direction and enter the narrow alleys that spread like veins throughout the Latin Quarter. ‘Your French is very good,’ she said as we walked. ‘Where did
you learn?’

‘School, mostly. Then university. I seem to have a facility for it. We used to come here when I was a child, too, before the war. Brittany. My father fought in the first war, you see, and
he developed this love for France. I think the fighting gave him a sort of stake in things.’

‘Do you, too, have this stake in France?’

‘I don’t know.’

She found the cafe she was looking for on the Rue St Séverin, and we ducked inside. ‘Can you feel what’s happening?’ she asked me, once we were warm and dry, sitting at
the zinc counter with hot, strong coffees before us. She lit a Gauloise and touched my arm. ‘Isn’t it exciting?’

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
She
thought something was happening between us. I could hardly disguise my joy. But I was also so tongue-tied that I couldn’t think of
anything wise or witty to say. I probably sat there, my mouth opening and closing like a guppy’s before saying, ‘Yes.
Yes
, it is exciting.’

‘There’ll be a revolution before spring’s over, you mark my words. We’ll be rid of de Gaulle and ready to start building a new France.’

Ah, yes.
The revolution
. I should have known. It was the topic on everyone’s mind at the time. Except mine, that is. I tried not to show my disappointment. Not that I wasn’t
interested – you couldn’t be in Paris in the spring of 1968 and
not
be interested in the revolution one way or another – but I had been distracted from politics by my
thoughts of April. Besides, as radical as I might have appeared to some people, I was still a foreign national, and I had to do my best to keep a low political profile, difficult though it was. One
false step and I’d not only be out of a job but out of the country, and far away from April, for ever. And I had answered her question honestly; I didn’t know whether I had a stake in
France or not.

‘What does Brad think?’ I asked.

‘Brad?’ She seemed surprised by my question. ‘Brad is an anarchist.’

‘And you?’

She twisted her hair around her finger. ‘I’m not sure. I know I want change. I think I’m an anarchist too, though I’m not sure I’d want to be completely without any
sort of government at all. But we want the same things. Peace. A new, more equal society. He is an American, but they have had many demonstrations there, too, you know. Vietnam.’

‘Ah, yes. I remember some of them.’

We passed a while talking about my experiences in California, which seemed to fascinate April, though I must admit I was far more interested in tracing the contours of her face and drinking in
the beauty of her eyes and skin than I was in discussing the war in Vietnam.

In the end she looked at her watch and said she had to go to a lecture but would probably see me later at the cafe. I said I hoped so and watched her walk away.

•

You will have gathered that I loved April to distraction, but did she love me? I think not. She liked me well enough. I amused her, entertained her, and she was perhaps even
flattered by my attentions, but ultimately brash youth wins out over suave age. It was Brad she loved. Brad, whose status in my mind quickly changed from that of a mildly entertaining, reasonably
intelligent hanger-on to the bane of my existence.

He always seemed to be around, and I could never get April to myself. Whether this was deliberate – whether he was aware of my interest and made jealous by it – I do not know. All I
know is that I had very few chances to be alone with her. When we were together, usually at a cafe or walking in the street, we talked – talked of what was happening in France, of the future
of the university, of literature, of the Anarchists, Maoists, Trotskyists and Communists, talked about all these, but not, alas, of love.

Perhaps this was my fault. I never pushed myself on her, never tried to make advances, never tried to touch her, even though my cells ached to reach out and mingle with hers, and even though the
most casual physical contact – a touch on the arm, for example – set me aflame with desire. After our first few meetings, she would greet me with kisses on each cheek, the way she
greeted all her friends, and my cheeks would burn for hours afterwards. One day she left a silk scarf at the cafe, and I took it home and held it to my face like a lovesick schoolboy, inhaling
April’s subtle jasmine perfume as I tried to sleep that night.

But I did not dare make a pass; I feared her rejection and her laughter far more than anything else. While we do not have the capacity to choose our feelings in the first place, we certainly
have the ability to choose not to
act
on them, and that was what I was trying to do, admittedly more for my own sake than for hers.

•

When I did see April alone again it was late in the morning of 3 May, and I was still in bed. I had been up late the night before, trying to concentrate on a Faulkner paper I
had to present at a conference in Brussels that weekend, and as I had no actual classes on Fridays I had slept in.

The soft but insistent tapping at my door woke me from a dream about my father in the trenches (why is it we never seem to dream at night about those we dream about all day?) and I rubbed the
sleep out of my eyes.

I must explain that at the time, like the poor French workers, I wasn’t paid very much and consequently, as I didn’t need very much either, I lived in a small
pension
in a
cobbled alley off the Boulevard St Michel, between the university and the Luxembourg Gardens. As I could easily walk from the
pension
to my office at the Sorbonne, as I usually ate at the
university or at a cheap local bistro, and as I spent most of my social hours in the various bars and cafes of the Latin Quarter, I didn’t really need much more than a place to lay my head at
night.

I stretched, threw on my dressing gown and opened the door. I’m sure you can imagine my shock on finding April standing there.
Alone
. She had been to the room only once previously,
along with Brad and a couple of others for a nightcap of cognac after a Nina Simone concert, but she clearly remembered where I lived.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Richard—’ She had started calling me by my first name, at my insistence, though of course she pronounced it in the French manner, and it sounded
absolutely delightful to me every time she spoke it. ‘I didn’t know . . .’

‘Come in,’ I said, standing back. She paused a moment in the doorway, smiled shyly, then entered. I lay back on the bed, mostly because there was hardly enough room for two of us to
sit together.

‘Shall I make coffee?’ she asked.

‘There’s only instant.’

She made a typical April moue at the idea of instant coffee, as any true French person would, but I directed her to the tiny kitchenette behind the curtain and she busied herself with the
kettle, calling out over her shoulder as she filled it and turned on the gas.

‘There’s trouble at the university,’ she said. ‘That’s what I came to tell you. It’s happening at last. Everything’s boiling over.’

I remembered that there was supposed to be a meeting about the ‘Nanterre Eight’, who were about to face disciplinary charges the following Monday, and I assumed that was what she
meant.

‘What’s happening?’ I asked, still not quite awake.

April came back into the bedroom and sat demurely on the edge of my only chair, trying not to look at me lying on the bed. ‘The revolution,’ she said. ‘There’s already a
big crowd there. Students and lecturers together. They’re talking about calling the police. Closing down the university.’

This woke me up a little more. ‘They’re what?’

‘It’s true,’ April went on. ‘Somebody told me that the university authorities said they’d call in the police if the crowds didn’t disperse. But they’re
not dispersing, they’re getting bigger.’ She lit a Gauloise and looked around for an ashtray. I passed her one I’d stolen from the Café de la Lune. She smiled when she saw
it and took those short little puffs at her cigarette, hardly giving herself time to inhale and enjoy the tobacco before exhaling and puffing again. ‘Brad’s already there,’ she
added.

‘Then he’d better be careful,’ I said, getting out of bed. ‘He’s neither a student nor a French citizen.’

‘But don’t you see? This is everybody’s struggle!’

‘Try telling that to the police.’

‘You can be so cynical sometimes.’

‘I’m sorry, April,’ I said, not wanting to offend her. ‘I’m just concerned for him, that’s all.’ Of course, I was lying. Nothing would have pleased me
better than to see Brad beaten to a pulp by the police or, better still, deported, but I could hardly tell April that. The kettle boiled and she gave me a smile of forgiveness and went to make the
coffee. She only made one cup – for me – I noticed, and as I sipped it she talked on about what had happened that morning and how she could feel change in the air. Her animation and
passion excited me and I had to arrange my position carefully to avoid showing any obvious evidence of my arousal.

Even in the silences she seemed inclined to linger, and in the end I had to ask her to leave while I got dressed, as there was nowhere for her to retain her modesty, and the thought of her
standing so close to me, facing the wall, as I took off my dressing gown was too excruciating for me to bear. She pouted and left, saying she’d wait for me outside. When I rejoined her we
walked to the Sorbonne together, and I saw that she was right about the crowds. There was defiance in the air.

We found Brad standing with a group of Anarchists, and April went over to take his arm. I spoke with him briefly for a while, alarmed at some of the things he told me. I found some colleagues
from the literature department, and they said the police had been sent for. By four o’clock in the afternoon the university was surrounded by the Compagnies Républicaines de
Sécurité – the CRS, riot police – and a number of students and lecturers had been arrested. Before long even more students arrived and started fighting with the CRS to
free those who had been arrested. Nobody was backing down this time.

The revolution had begun.

•

I took the train to Brussels on Saturday morning and didn’t come back until late on Tuesday, and though I had heard news of events in Paris, I was stunned at what awaited
me on my return. The city was a war zone. The university was closed, and nobody knew when, or in what form, it would reopen. Even the familiar smell of the city – its coffee, cheese and
something slightly overripe aroma – had changed, and it now smelled of fire, burnt plastic and rubber. I could taste ashes in my mouth. I wandered the Latin Quarter in a dream, remnants of
the previous day’s tear gas stinging my eyes, barricades improvised from torn-up paving stones all over the place. Everywhere I went I saw the CRS, looking like invaders from space in their
gleaming black helmets, with chinstraps and visors, thick black uniforms, jackboots and heavy truncheons. They turned up out of nowhere in coaches with windows covered in wire mesh, clambered out
and blocked off whole streets apparently at random. Everywhere they could, people gathered and talked politics. The mood was swinging: you could taste it in the air along with the gas and ashes.
This wasn’t just another student demonstration, another Communist or Anarchist protest; this was civil war. Even the bourgeoisie were appalled at the violence of the police attacks. There
were reports of pregnant women being beaten, of young men being tortured, their genitals shredded.

This was the aftermath of what later came to be known as ‘Bloody Monday’, when the ‘Nanterre Eight’ had appeared at the Sorbonne, triumphantly singing the
‘Internationale’, and sparked off riots.

I had missed April terribly while I was in Brussels, and now I was worried that she might have been hurt or arrested. I immediately tried to seek her out, but it wasn’t easy. She
wasn’t at her student residence, nor at Brad’s hotel. I tried the Café de la Lune and various other watering holes in the area, but to no avail. Eventually I ran into someone I
knew, who was able to tell me that he thought she was helping one of the student groups produce posters, but he didn’t know where. I gave up and went back to my room, unable to sleep,
expecting her gentle rap on the door at any moment. It never came.

I saw her again on Thursday, putting up posters on the Rue St Jacques.

‘I was worried about you,’ I told her.

She smiled and touched my arm. For a moment I let myself believe that my concern actually mattered to her. I could understand her dedication to what was happening; after all, she was young, and
it was her country. I knew that all normal social activities were on hold, that the politics of revolution had little time or space for the personal, for such bourgeois indulgences as love, but
still I selfishly wanted her, wanted to be with her.