The Last Days of New Paris Page 3

They had come flank-by-side onto the streets with Nazis and their Vichy allies, patrolling with specialist witch-officers, launching joint attacks, with bullets and bombs and the spit and boiling blood of Hell. It was clear: whereas the manifs had no overseers, the Reich had invoked these other things to win the war. Their collaboration was not always successful. There were times when, even during onslaughts against their enemies, their bickering exploded into bad-tempered massacres, fiends and Nazis ripping each other open while their targets, their own slaughter interrupted, listened bemused to screaming accusations on both sides.

  Now they were here, to those who watched closely the devils were as cowed as their army handlers, as stranded in impossible Paris as everyone else. They came up but were not seen descending. Hide outside their lairs—as did the bravest or suicidal human spies—and you might sometimes hear them sobbing for a Gehenna from which by incompetent demonology it seemed they were permanently exiled.

  You could learn to see that the living art of the city intimidated them. It sent them scurrying if outnumbered, or nervously on the attack if not.

  “Those,” Thibaut said to his comrades that night on the roof, of the devil-like things below them, “are not demons. They’re manifs.”

  Living images. Images of demons, and of their victim. And not even sentient like most of the art come alive in New Paris, but looping.

  “No!” said Pierre, bringing his rifle back up. “Fucking bullshit,” he said, and aimed again. But he did not fire, and his comrades watched the scene repeat, until Élise gently pushed his gun down.

  Thibaut whispers to those gone.

  It’s night but he keeps walking. He wants cool air and dark to draw its edges into white Paris stone like drafting ink. So he walks crumbling streets until the moon arrives, then closes his eyes and walks more, lets his unconscious pull him toward whichever moldering house it will, feeling for safety. I’ll sleep an hour, he thinks. Two, three hours, that’s all.

  When his fingers touch wood he looks again. He forces the door. His footsteps squelch on a swampy carpet. He walks with his gun up.

  From a mantelpiece of a large front room a dream mammal watches him with marmoset eyes. It cringes at him. Blood drips from sickle claws. In the puddles on the floor, a drowned woman lies facedown. Thibaut sees her mottled shoulder blades: he abruptly knows, with an inner flex of insight, that the animal is waiting for her to rot.

  He should be quiet at night—especially on this, his last night—but he is full of the rage of a failed soldier. He aims at the carnivore bush-baby.

  It hesitates, as manifs do before him. Thibaut surrenders his will and fires, Surrealist-style.

  His bullets sway. They correct mid-flight, burst into the thing as it leaps, slam it against the wall where it thumps its limbs and dissolves like tar.

  Thibaut waits. His weapon smokes. Nothing appears. He goes to turn the dead woman but stops, holds his face in his hands and wonders if he will cry. He cannot sleep now.

  Two days after the Main à plume’s abortive assault on the non-demons, as Thibaut ate his stale-bread breakfast, Virginie put a book on the table in front of him.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  She flipped through engravings to a picture of a trumpeting thing, a spiked tail, a horde of little devils. He recognized them. They beset the same St. Anthony that they had seen a few streets away.

  “It’s by Schongauer,” she said.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “A library.”

  Thibaut shook his head at her foolishness or bravery. To plunder a library! Books were not safe.

  “Thing is,” she said. “That manif? Of this image? I don’t think it just self-generated. It’s not close enough. To the heart of the S-Blast.”

  In the fecund shock waves of the explosion, it was not only the Surrealists’ own dreams that had manifested. Born with them were figures from Symbolism and Decadence, imaginings of the Surrealists’ ancestors and beloveds, ghosts from their proto-canon. Now Redon’s leering ten-legged spider hunted at one end of rue Jean Lantier, chattering its big teeth. A figure with Arcimboldo’s coagulate fruit face stalked the boundaries of the Saint-Ouen market.

  “If this was Dürer, maybe,” she said, “or Piranesi. Schongauer? He’s important, but I don’t think he’s core enough to manifest spontaneously. I think someone invoked this deliberately.”

  “Who?” Thibaut said. “Why?”

  “The Nazis. Maybe they want devils that’ll follow orders better. I think they want their own manifs,” Virginie said. “I think they’re still trying.” They regarded each other. Pictured their enemies tugging at images from pages with whatever invocatory engines they could put together. “The Führer himself,” Virginie said heavily, “is an artist, after all.” Reproductions of his barely competent watercolors, his hesitant lines, his featureless faces, his vacuous, pretty, empty urban façades, had circulated as curios in occult Paris. Virginie and Thibaut shared a glance of contempt.

  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 w
ords 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.”

  Chapter Two

  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.”