The Last Days of New Paris Page 7

  So he checked his tools and dressed for dinner. When he entered the dining room, everyone turned to look, and he hesitated.

  Come on, he told himself. You’re here for a reason.

  —

  Painters, poets, anarchists, Reds. A poised blond woman gave Parsons her hand and introduced herself as Jacqueline Lamba. Jack nodded as politely as he could and followed her to meet her husband.

  André Breton. A fleshy-faced man with sweeping hair. He looked at the young American with half-closed eyes of almost languid intensity. Parsons met the stare with his own. “I wanted to ask you something,” Parsons began. “About Ithell Colquhoun.”

  “Je ne parle pas anglais.” Breton shrugged, and walked away.

  Jack frowned and took a glass of wine. A slight dark-skinned man introduced himself. “Wilfredo, Wilfredo Lam.” Remedios Varo, a painter, black-haired, with an intense gaze, nodded at Jack without much interest. A cool, tall woman, Kay Sage, inclined her head. Jack said hello to them all and kept watching Breton, who would not talk to him. A vivid-eyed man called Tanguy laughed too loud. These Surrealists wore battered evening clothes.

  “Jack Parsons,” Fry said to a small smiling gentleman, Benjamin Péret, who greeted Jack with a lopsided mouth, while Mary Jayne and Miriam watched. “He’s stranded among the Nazis.”

  “The Nazis? You know of Trotsky?” said Péret.

  “I guess.”

  “He says these fascists are dust that is human.” Péret nodded vigorously. “He is right.”

  “What would they think of you, Parsons?” someone said.

  They sat to heavy vegetable stew seasoned only with salt. Parsons breathed deep and drew strength from the hex-fouled land outside. Do they even know? he thought. That something’s happened?

  He sat in the Villa Air-Bel with the artists and radicals, writers, the philosophers that bleeding-heart Americans wanted to smuggle out of France. What am I doing here? He looked at his food in despair.

  “Foreigners need to carry seven pieces of paper all the time,” Mary Jayne Gold was saying. Why was she looking at him like that? Had he invited this information? Jack had lost track.

  “You don’t say,” said Jack. “That’s crazy.”

  “Varian says you’re a scientist.”

  “Yeah. I work with…” He made his hand zoom through the air. “Rockets.” I make bombs fly with fucking Greek fire. And you will thank me.

  “Do you know our guests made a pack of cards?” Miriam said.

  “I did not know that.”

  “Yes,” said Lamba. She laughed. “We will play with you.”

  —

  Trapped in their Marseille hinterland, this pre-exile, the Surrealists had drawn new suits, a cartographic rebellion. Black Stars for dreams; black Locks, Keyholes, for knowledge; red Flames for desire; and Wheels for revolution. They had enshrined beloveds as face-cards: de Sade, Alice, Baudelaire, Hegel, Lautréamont.

  “There’s talk of having them printed, eventually,” Fry said with an effort.

  “Play is resistance,” said Lamba, with her heavy accent.

  That’s how you rebel? Parsons realized his disgust must show. In a town full of Gestapo, informers, fascists, fighters. That’s it?

  Breton was looking at him at last, in challenge.

  “I saw two boys in town,” Miriam was saying to someone. “They each had two fishing rods, crossed over their backs. Do you get it? Deux Gaulles—it’s a pun, de Gaulle. They’re stating their opposition.”

  Get me out of here, Parsons thought.

  “What is it exactly brings you here, Mr. Parsons?” Mary Jayne was brittle. “This is a very odd time to travel.”

  —

  Parsons could not keep track of the visitors, though their names and expertise and philosophical positions were all announced to him in what felt like mockery.

  When, late, a thin, tough-faced young man came in, Mary Jayne shouted with pleasure and went to him. Miriam glowered and made to rise, but Varian Fry, though he frowned at the newcomer, put his hand on hers to hold her back.

  Raymond Couraud, his arm in Mary Jayne’s, stared slowly around the room. Breton pursed his lips and looked away.

  “I did tell André that you were asking about Ithell Colquhoun,” Parsons heard Fry say. The name got his attention. Breton was nodding at him with a moment’s interest. He spoke and Fry translated. “She did come to visit him a while ago. That’s why he put her work in that little volume.”

  That was all. These people are nothing, Parsons thought. Nothing.

  —

  “It’s bad for us,” Von Karman had said to him, of his family, of the Jews of Europe. “My great-great-however-many-times-great grandfather,” he had said, “was Rabbi Loew. You know Rabbi Loew, Jack? From Prague. He made a giant clay man and figured out how to bring him to life to keep the Jews safe. You know what that made him? The first applied mathematician.”

  Von Karman liked that joke. He repeated it often. It pleased Jack, too, but for different reasons. Von Karman was right: to make life was to speak aleph where there was silence, to add one to a zero. Jack read everything he could find on Loew, the efforts and triumphs of that devout man.

  Between the trajectories of rocket falls, rainbow-shapes and gravity, between his imaginings of the screamings across the sky that he would send the Nazis, Parsons, with exhausting care and thoroughness, developed an arithmetic of invocation, an algebra of ritual. A witching plan.

  I’ll go to Prague, he decided at last. He checked his proofs. I’m an engineer: I’ll make an engine. I’ll do the math in the grounds of the ghetto. I’ll bring back this golem.

  He could do it. He looked forward to its swinging steps, its thick clay hands cleaving storm troopers, its purging of the city. That would shake up this war. Screw it, he thought. I’ll do it for Theo.

  And now here he was trapped in France by war and devil-science. In the room Fry had lent him, before descending, Jack Parsons had unwound the jury-rigged engine he had constructed to make his mathematics actual, to unfold the world. Batteries; sensors; an abacus; wires and circuits; transistors.

  Colquhoun, Crowley’s most desired and this guy Breton’s collaborator, she had to be a gate, right?

  But look. Look around this absurd room in this violent halfway town. Jack was among fops and artists. His time had been wasted.

  Chapter Five

  1950

  Thibaut has always said “Fall Rot” in English: an injunction; two verbs, or a noun and a verb; seasonal decay.

  “Case Red,” Sam says. “It’s German. I think it’s something big.” She watches him closely. “You’ve heard of it,” she says.

  In the economy of rumor, the partisans of Paris are always listening for stories of their enemies. Of any mention of Rudy de Mérode, of Brunner, of Goebbels and Himmler, of William Joyce or Rebatat or Hitler himself. Myth, spycraft, bullshit. “What do you know about someone called Gerhard?” Thibaut says. That name he has heard once, and once only, when the dying woman whispered it to him.

  “Wolfgang Gerhard.” She says it slowly. “Nothing. But I’ve heard of him. A Wehrmacht deserter sold me that name at the border. He said it’s turning up in the chatter. Along with Fall Rot. Which I’d already heard of, Fall Rot, from a man in Sebastopol. That’s a bad place now. Full of devils.” She smiles oddly.

  “He’d been into Paris, this guy, and got rich on what he brought out,” Sam says. “He didn’t care about Ernst, Matta, Tanning, Fini, he just wanted things. He had one of you-know-who’s telephone, that was…” Her hands describe it. “A lobster. With wires. If you held it to your ear it would grab for you and get its legs tangled in your hair, but it could tell you secrets. It never said anything to me. It didn’t like me. But this guy told me it once whispered to him, ‘Fall Rot’s coming.’ ”

  “That’s why you’re here,” says Thibaut. “To find out about this Fall Rot. Not to take photographs.” He feels betrayed.

  “I am here for photogra
phs. For The Last Days of New Paris. Remember?” She is playful in a way he doesn’t understand. “And to find a few other things out, too. A bit of information. That’s true. You don’t have to stay with me.”

  Thibaut beckons the exquisite corpse through the dust of ruins. Sam flinches at its approach. “They’re chasing you,” Thibaut says. “You got a picture of something that got the Nazis worked up enough to track you. What is it has them so worried?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I have a lot of pictures. I’d have to get out to develop them to figure it out and there’s more to photograph first. I can’t leave. I don’t know what’s going on yet. Don’t you want to know about Fall Rot?”

  What Thibaut has wanted is out. To outrace those who follow, now maybe to find whatever image in Sam’s films holds some secret Nazi weakness, to use it against them. But to his own surprise something in him, even now, stays faithful to his Paris. He’s buoyed by the thought of Sam’s book, that swan song, that valedictory to a city not yet dead. He wants the book, and there are pictures to take. When he tries to think of leaving, Thibaut’s head gets foggy. It’s madness, but Not yet, he thinks, not before we’ve finished.

  The book is important. He knows this.

  He imagines an oversized volume, bound in leather, with hand-drawn endpapers. Or another, rougher edition, rushed out by some backstreet press. Thibaut wants to hold it. To see photographs of these walls on which the crackwork whispers and scratch-figures etched with keys shift; of the impossibilities he has fought, that now walk with him.

  —

  Are they hunting images, then, as well as information about Fall Rot? Whatever else, Thibaut decides, yes, they are.

  He follows Sam north over a spill of architecture. Refit vehicles still line the streets, too-big sunflowers push their way through buildings, a quiet partisan leans cross-armed over a rifle in a top-floor window, watching them. She raises her hand to Thibaut in a wary salute that he returns.

  Sam photographs. They sleep in shifts. At dawn a great shark mouth appears at the horizon smiling like a stupid angel and chewing silently on the sky.

  Women and men committed to no side, to nothing except trying to live, have taken up paving stones and plowed up earth underneath. They farm amid changeable ruins, fighting Hellish things and feral dreams. They have made front-room schools for their children in townlets of a street or two, keep barricades up.

  One such is close to where a house has gone. By their path, where the cellar was, the hole has filled with sodden grit. Thibaut slows here, can feel something. He stops Sam. He points. There are wet bones in the pit.

  The travelers stay still and something twitches in the sludge. Snares of tubular parts tangle, untangle and rear. Water falls with a rushing sound away from a big vicious elliptical head rising, now the ambush has failed.

  It is a sandbumptious, an ugly thing torn from an English painting. It eyes them with eyes on bobbing stems. Judging by the remains around it, it eats stragglers and scrawny horses, like most of its kind.

  Sam takes a picture of the predator rising in the muck, and hissing. When she’s done, Thibaut braces his rifle on the remains of a wall. He focuses from his core.

  His aim is not very good, but his focus can enhance his fire, his techniques are powerful, and the proximity of the exquisite corpse helps him. When he shoots his bullets slam into the hole and its inhabitant and the wallowing animal bleats and all in a rush, a single flame, at the wrong scale like the tip of a giant matchhead, takes it and goes out.

  There is a burnt-out smell. The manif is dead.

  As Thibaut and Sam walk on someone shouts “Hey!”

  Wary faces rise into view above the nearby barrier. A tough-faced woman with her hair under a scarf throws Thibaut a bag of bread and vegetables. “We saw what you did,” she says.

  “Thank you,” says a younger man in a flat hat, looking down his shotgun, “and no offense, but fuck off now, and stay away.” He watches the exquisite corpse.

  “This?” Thibaut says. “It won’t cause you any trouble.”

  “Fuck off and keep your Nazis away.”

  “What? What did you call me?” Thibaut shouts. “I’m Main à plume!”

  “You’ll bring them here!” the man shouts back. “Everyone knows you’re being hunted!” Sam and Thibaut look at each other.

  “You heard of Wolfgang Gerhard?” Sam shouts. The young fighter shakes his head and gestures them away.

  The wind explores the buildings. They hear firefights in distant streets. Thibaut and Sam descend a series of great declivities cracked in the pavement, that Thibaut realizes are the footprints of some giant.

  —

  Near the boulevard Montparnasse, Sam checks her charts and journals in the hard sunlight. An old woman watches Thibaut from a doorway. She beckons and when he comes to her, she hands him a glass of milk. He can hear a cow lowing in the cellar.

  “Careful,” she says. “Devils are around.”

  “For the catacombs?” he wonders. Their entrance is nearby, by the tollhouses called the Barrière d’Enfer.

  She shrugs. “I don’t think even the Germans know what they’re doing. The observatory’s close,” she says, “and it’s full of astronomers from Hell. Round here when they look through the telescopes we see what they remember.”

  The milk is cool and Thibaut drinks it slowly. “Can I do anything for you?” he says.

  “Just be careful.”

  In Place Denfert-Rochereau, the Lion of Belfort has disappeared from its plinth. Surrounding the empty platform where the black statue used to stare stiff-legged are now a crowd of stone men and women, all with the heads of lions.

  Thibaut is happy among those frozen flaneurs. The exquisite corpse murmurs beside him.

  Sam is agitated. She won’t or can’t come close, will only just enter the square. She takes pictures of the motionless crowd from the edge and watches him with a curious expression.

  Élise, Thibaut thinks. Jean. You should be here. For the first time since the Bois de Boulogne he feels as if he is somewhere that he has fought for.

  He should have played his card. I killed my friends, he thinks.

  What treachery against the collectivism, the war socialism of the Main à plume, keeping the card for himself. He doesn’t even know what it would have done. But play is insurrection in the rubble of objective chance. That was the aspiration, the wager of the Surrealists trapped in the southern house.

  “Historians of the playing card,” Breton said, “all agree that throughout the ages the changes it has undergone have always been at times of great military defeats.” Turn defeat into furious play. The story had reached Paris with its manifs. Breton, Char, Dominguez, Brauner, Ernst, Hérold, Lam, Masson, Lamba, Delanglade, and Péret, purveyors of the new deck. Genius, Siren, Magus usurping the pitiful aristocratic nostalgia of King, Queen, and Jack. Père Ubu the Joker, his spiraled stomach mesmeric.

  The cards were made and lost, and sometimes found again. If the war stories were true, a bird-faced Pancho Villa, Magus of Revolution, played by some Gévaudan militant, had saved his fighters from demon-baiting soldiers. In 1946, the cephalopod heads of Paracelsus, Magus of Keyholes, rose from the Seine and sank two Kriegsmarine ships. Freud, Carroll’s Alice, the Ace of Flames, de Sade, Hegel, a beetle-faced Lamiel are rumored to be loose.

  Thibaut carries the Siren of Keyholes. Victor Brauner’s work. That double-faced woman in snarling jaguar stole. Drawn on paper but transferred by some force, scribbled lines, unfinished and all, to a card.

  But Thibaut is too cautious a player. He trudges in guilt. He walks with the exquisite corpse, avatar of mad love, in a week of kindness.

  —

  “Tonight,” Sam says. They bivouac in a preserved café. “There’s another picture I need to take.”

  Thibaut looks up through the unbroken window and struggles to speak. “How about a picture of that?” he says at last.

  The stars are wheeling far faster than
they should. The sky is dark gray, the stars yellow, and they are not the stars of earth. They are alien clusters. Abruptly and from nowhere Thibaut knows each constellation—the Alligator, the Box without Locks, the Fox-Trap. They shift in all directions.

  Sam is smiling. “The devils must be looking through the telescope,” she says. “It’s like that woman said.” He didn’t know she’d heard her. “That’s the sky over Hell. They must feel nostalgic,” Sam says. “There’s no gate here. It’s hard for anything more than scraps to get in or out. To Hell, from Hell, I mean. All the demons can do is look.”

  “Do you have any pictures of devils?” Thibaut says. Sam smiles again.

  —

  There are lost Nazis in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Men who sob at some depredation, mesmerized by the Statue of Liberty in the grounds. Its head is gone, just a knot of girders, its up-thrust right hand a gnarl. Protruding from the iron chest is a corpulent flesh eye. It blinks. One soldier calls out a prayer, in German, then French. He is hushed by his comrades.

  Thibaut and Sam creep by them in the hedgerow. The exquisite corpse fades in and out of their company, always returning. It accelerates through the overgrowing gardens, through thickets and rosebushes, its caterpillar rearing, to where tall railings at its edge are spread like the tines of a ruined fork.

  Night comes with gunfire. The beige and black shutters of rue Guynemer are bloody. Sam does not take rue Bonaparte but smaller streets, away from the lights and engine sounds of someone’s excavations. The Bureau of Surrealist Research is nearby—long-closed but haunted with emanations from those early experiments, cabinets of juxtaposed equipment. The exquisite corpse is energized here.

  This is a contested zone. In the rue du Four they hide at the sounds of shouted German. “There are bases nearby,” Sam whispers. The Hotel Lutetia where Nazi officers are stationed, the Prison du Cherche-Midi where political prisoners become experiments and food for terrible things.

  “Where are you taking us?” Thibaut says. When he sees the spire of a church at the end of rue de Rennes, he abruptly knows the answer.