I Burn Paris

I

Behind thick, tightly sealed walls remained those who were beyond the reach of the plague.

In the death-flooded fields of Paris, in the silent hour of the tide’s ebb, three islands of human life emerged, swaying on the ebbing waves like bald white shoals on the dead calm of the waters.

These were the islands of shaven-headed Robinsons, cut off from the rest of the world by the icy gulf stream of the law.

Lost among the deltas of streets, barricaded by the isolating liquid seeping from their walls, subject to their own internal laws like self-contained organisms in a different reality, they survived through the long weeks untouched, indifferent, like strange floating houses swept by flooding at night, bobbing to the surface in the morning, their inhabitants drowsy and unsuspecting.

The half-crazed prison guards, afraid of being held responsible and anticipating sudden orders, surrounded the inmates with a double ring of the tightest isolation. Their tongues were tied in fear of the crowded prisons learning about the epidemic and the chaos rampant outside, and of the cue to revolt.

The prisons had their own water reservoirs, so by sheer circumstance they avoided contracting the deadly bacteria from the outset. Their abundant supplies of food combined with the tight seclusion did the rest.

What had occurred was as improbable as it was undeniable: in its journey through the city the plague repeatedly bumped against the high medieval walls of these strange islands with their hermetically sealed gates, and then continued on into the night, into the gloom, into the tangle of streets and alleyways.

In the center and on the outskirts of the infected city, three untouched islands remained, surrounded by the dikes of their walls, inhabited by throngs of the shaven-headed pressed into their square allotments, long cut off from the outside world and fingering their monotonous rosaries of prison days, oblivious to what was taking place beyond the walls.

From the very first day of the epidemic, newspapers stopped seeping through the prison walls, causing the prisoners to protest and demonstrate. When this had no effect, a hunger strike was called. The hunger strike lasted four weeks and ultimately capitulated without bringing any results. Its only real outcome was to conserve provisions, which thus held out a few more days.

After the newspapers stopped arriving, the daily meals deteriorated, and then were reduced. Exhausted from the hunger strike, the prisoners saw this as another notch in the punitive regime. The deterioration of the food led to several more longer or shorter hunger strikes, which preserved some of the provisions but only delayed the inevitable.

The food portions grew more meager with every passing day. In fear of the prisoners’ retaliation, the tiny group of guards who were also barricaded in this inadvertent Noah’s Ark on the waves of the deluge suddenly cut the daily strolls, too afraid to release this riled human mass from their cells.

Denied their basic privileges and packed into the cramped barrels of their cells, the mob fermented until it seemed ready to blow, and the cells, filled ten times beyond capacity after the recent crackdowns, shuddered in their stone joints.

As the petrified prison guards scraped the bottoms of the food crates, terror filled their eyes. The certainty of execution at the hands of the despairing prisoners, ready to rip the bolted doors off their hinges, tempted them to flee for their lives, to the city. Yet their fear of the plague raging outside stopped them in their tracks.

A solution presented itself.

On the day of September 4, four days after the plague had claimed the last living Parisian soul and then marched out of Paris, the famished mob held at Fresnes Prison tore open the cell doors and poured through the prison building. Hiding in the attic, the guards were ripped to shreds. At ten o’clock in the morning the restless mob came crashing through the open gates and into the square.

To their considerable surprise, there was no police or military cordon to stop them. More disquieted than elated, the crowd silently flowed toward the city without encountering a single living soul on their way.

Someone cried for the release of the fifteen thousand prisoners locked up in La Santé Prison. The stoked mob moved toward Boulevard Arago. The prison gates were taken by storm before reinforcements could be brought up. The astonished prison staff were put to death.

Upon hearing of the unexpected relief, the prisoners forced the cell doors and spilled into the yard. The brownish meat of the gathered masses boiled over from the narrow troughs of the courtyards and into Boulevard Arago.

On Boulevard Arago, the crowd formed a procession and drew upward in a sturdy wave. Someone piped up with The Internationale. That lonely, timid voice was like a match igniting the crowd. The alcohol of twenty-eight thousand voices burst into melodious flames. The mob had swollen as heavy as a lead-colored cloud, and now the rain of song poured from it. Like on a sweltering day charged with electricity, so dry that one seems to hear the crackle of sparks in one’s hair, the refreshing downpour suddenly gave the air the fragrance of freshly soaked earth. With the protracted shudder of an electric current, the song ran through the gigantic serpentine body of the mass, from the head to the tail, joining the scattered human cells into one nimble organism, animated through the artery of its uniform rhythm. Twenty-eight thousand pairs of legs hit the hard shell of the pavement in unison with every turn of an invisible steering wheel, and the earth flashed sparks from the quick kiss of their feet.

The extraordinary procession moved through the deathly quiet of this ghost town, down the silent ravine of the boulevard, a demonstration of miserable men with shaved heads and gray prison garb. They had no banners, only the red flag of the sun raised high above their heads, and in the empty inlets of the streets this song of retribution struck an oddly menacing note, this song of the last fight, whose refrain hit the empty, shattered windows like the butt of a rifle.

At the end of Boulevard Montparnasse the front of the procession unexpectedly balled up in one spot, and the whole snake halted in its march and rippled with thousands of fists.

The crowd convulsed at the sight of what was unfolding before its eyes, as if the cold paw of terror had touched its naked heart.

On the streets and sidewalks, in the wicker chairs on the bistro verandas, human corpses lay in the twisted and incomprehensible poses chosen by death. They were starting to reek.

Consumed by fear, the procession continued on in silence.

The appeals and decrees in various languages plastered on the walls of the various district-states told the story of the past six weeks; it slowly unfolded before the crowd’s wondering eyes in all its grotesque horror.

The procession turned onto Grands Boulevards, everywhere encountering the same tableau: a vast mortuary, staring through the glaze of one million eyes into the clear blue sky.

At the end of Boulevard Haussmann the crowd splintered into two groups, one of which flowed toward Saint-Lazare, to the women’s prison. The closed prison gates met the demonstrators with a hollow silence. They forced them open using iron rails from the train station. Nobody inside tried to put up any resistance. The guards, it turned out, had fled to the city four days earlier in fear of the prisoners’ revenge, condemning the three thousand women in their cells to death by starvation. The inmates hadn’t eaten for ten days.

In ransacking the Gare Saint-Lazare, they unexpectedly found ample food reserves in its warehouses and stations, which had been stored there by the thriftiest of the district-states, the Anglo-American territory. A provisions committee was assembled ad hoc, and they at once took to organizing food distribution.

Spontaneous patrols spread from the Saint-Lazare train station to the rest of the city to inspect the remaining prisons. The patrols returned before evening empty-handed, one after another. The prisons were found open, full of rotting, plague-infested corpses. No other living beings remained in all of Paris.

Night fell, and the thirty-two-thousand strong crowd, preferring to stay clear of the apartments with their stinking corpses, bivouacked on the streets, the tireless tentacles of their sentries probing into the night.

II

The following morning, a newly constituted Central Committee of the Party hastily convened in the grand hall of the former Ministry of War.

The day was sunny, and the air dripping with spring. Thirteen people in gray prison shirts sat at the long table, green as the ruffled turf after a picnic, with scraps of notes tossed here and there like eggshells. The windows were thrown open wide, and the sunshine and the hubbub of the mass gathered in Place de la Concorde drifted in unceremoniously. The blissful atmosphere of this pseudo-springtime ushered in memories of April, interspersed by the distant rumble of turmoil and the thick, rushing downpour of applause, which would suddenly pick up, only to subside with equal swiftness.

Courreau, Secretary of the Central Committee, took the floor:

“We cannot be sure if the plague hasn’t already managed to spread beyond the Paris city limits. Based on our current data, however, everything seems to indicate that Paris is still surrounded by tight military cordons, whose task is to isolate it from the rest of Europe. This would indicate that they have managed to contain the plague. As soon as the government and the surrounding armies discover that the epidemic has vanished from the capital, they will surely advance on the city the very next day and throw the proletariat back into prison. After all the suffering they’ve endured to free themselves, we cannot allow this to happen. Given that Paris has ended up in our hands after such tragic circumstances, we have no right to hand it back to the capitalists and the exploiters.”

“And how, if I may ask, do you intend to keep it?” cut in Comrade Majoie, anxiously scratching at his thin beard. “With thirty-thousand starving workers, we can’t even dream of standing up to a proper army surrounding Paris from all sides. We have no right to lead these miserable remnants of the Parisian proletariat to the slaughter.”

“Allow me to finish, comrade. We can hold onto Paris in a very simple way, without resorting to armed resistance, which is beyond our meager strength. At all costs we must keep France and the whole world under the delusion that the plague is raging through Paris just as before and is showing no signs of abating. All we need to do is put our people in the Eiffel radio station to send out worldwide bulletins every morning on the relentless devastation wrought by the infestation within the sealed confines of Paris. As long as the government and the army are convinced that the epidemic is going full force, they won’t dare set foot in the city.”

“It seems you’ve forgotten, comrade, that the population of Paris is limited in number, and that it can only die once,” smiled Comrade Majoie. “A simple calculation will tell them that every living soul in Paris should have been killed off long ago.”

“I think not. By gradually increasing the reports, knowledgeably and with moderation, we should be able to keep Europe in the dark for a very long time. We have to inculcate our country, drop by drop, with the belief that for months and months to come, and who knows, for perhaps even years, Paris will be no more than a dangerous epicenter of plague, that all of its infrastructure has been destroyed, and that returning it to its former state would require billions in investments and years of labor. I assure you that nothing works so effectively as getting people accustomed to the status quo. Those who were initially unable to imagine the World War lasting for more than four weeks had already stopped believing by the end of the fourth year that it could ever come to an end. They had grown so accustomed to this state of affairs that it came to be entirely natural, and no other way even seemed possible.”

“So, as I see it, you’d like to turn us into Robinson Crusoes on a desert island, condemned to fishing in the Seine and hunting monkeys in the Bois de Boulogne for years on end,” quipped Comrade Majoie. “I see no point in this deception.”

“Allow me, comrade,” suddenly piped up Comrade Maraq, a withered, bony man with a drooping, angular face, a champion hunger-striker in prison, who could best anyone even with a week’s head start.

Everyone turned to face him.

“I think I understand Comrade Courreau’s idea. Just today I was doing a check-up on the Eiffel radio station, and the same thought occurred to me: keep Europe believing that the plague is still in Paris for as long as possible. Meanwhile, we occupy the city and establish the ideal commune. In the middle of France, in the heart of Europe, we could change a world metropolis into a massive communist city, a hotbed and a cell, radiating our system across the whole continent. As soon as we are organized, and before our deception is unveiled, we’ll call out to the workers and peasants in France and the whole world behind the backs of the surrounding army. Let’s not forget that behind the army cordon stand the French proletarian masses. The call from the East may not have reached them, it may have been drowned out by the whistle, roar, and swing of the capitalist jazz orchestra, but when it comes from Paris, it will shake all of Europe. Do I understand you correctly, Comrade Courreau?”

Comrade Courreau nodded his head.

After a moment’s silence, Comrade Durail took the floor, having kept thus far to one side:

“Comrades Courreau and Maraq’s plan is quite elegant, but I fear it is unfeasible. Comrades Courreau and Maraq are not considering one real, though unfortunate, fact: It won’t be enough for Europe to leave us in peace if we want to survive for months behind the cordon. We also need something to fill our bellies. We have thirty-two thousand mouths to feed; they have already starved half to death in prison and cannot starve any longer. Comrade Duffy, who just today made a record of the provisions we found hidden around the city, is best able to inform us on the state of our rations and how long they might feed the whole commune.”

All eyes turned to Comrade Duffy.

Comrade Duffy, fiddling with a pencil and tapping a beat on the table, began to speak in a monotonous, pedantic voice, as if reciting a report he’d chiseled into his memory:

“We haven’t been able to record all the city’s provisions in a single day. We found substantial rations of flour and sugar at the Gare Saint-Lazare. Around four hundred tons in total. The grain elevators contained one thousand two hundred tons. Larger or smaller stocks of provisions, mainly canned goods and pasta, were found in the cellars of factories and meat-processing plants. In the cellars of many private homes in the districts of Étoile, Grands Boulevards, Saint-Germain, and Passy, we found large quantities of flour, rice, and sugar. The residents there were clearly hoarding these items in fear of starvation. We’ll need another thorough investigation to confirm the exact amount of these products. Roughly speaking, the total amount of foodstuffs unearthed over the course of the day can be set at two thousand tons. Considering the average human body requires a daily intake of 82g of protein, 100g of fats, 310g of carbohydrates and 26g of vitamins, this, when converted into numerals, tallies up to enough bread alone – in the absence of other substances – for at least 350g daily, meaning that the provisions discovered thus far should provide sustenance for thirty-two thousand people for four to five months at most. Of course, there is no way to tell how much food we still might find in the factory cellars and residential homes. Only a more thorough search will reveal…”

A new wave of applause came splashing in through the window, drowning out his remaining words.

Comrade Majoie lit a cigarette, paced the room in contemplation, and stood before the window. Down below, the square was obscured by the swarm of heads. A rally was underway. The ceremonial speakers climbed nimbly onto the sheer pediments of the eight symbolic virgin-cities and tossed handfuls of powerful and strident words like pills into the gaping mouths of the crowd, tickling their noses and spinning their heads.

A one-armed mustachioed man was speaking from the pedestal of the virgin symbolizing Strasbourg:

“Now, comrades, I would like to say a word about our comrades from the criminal profession. Among us there are around three thousand larcenous comrades who were released from prison with the rest of the proletariat. We do not intend, comrades, to drag them before a tribunal. Though they are criminals, as they say, we should view their crimes as having been committed against the old bourgeois order – and who then was not considered a criminal? Surely more than one of us has swiped a pound of sausage or a side of ham out of hunger, misery, or unemployment, haven’t we? Such a man, their courts chewed him up – and then off to the slammer! He’s a thief, end of story. But we do not intend, comrades, to bother ourselves with these details. A revolution’s a revolution. What I’m trying to say is: freedom for everyone, no ifs, ands, or buts. In other words, the old sins, whatever they were, never happened – you might say it’s amnesty, and that’s that. From this day forward, everything starts from scratch, our way. Bygones are bygones, know what I mean?

“But comrades – now that our thieving comrades have their civil rights restored and so forth, they should show us their proletarian roots. We had various scores to settle with the bourgeoisie, and we swallowed a lot of grief – but now everything’s been wiped clean. Now we’re all equal workers, proletarians, period. If someone’s stealing from the people – then beat it! We’ve got no time to be fooling around with the likes of them, comrades. The proletariat authority will unceremoniously punish every raid on communal property. Let all future comrade-thieves bear that in mind. What’s past is past, and from this day on – no mention of it! We have no need, comrades, for courts or trials. If we catch a thief stealing from our communal stores – up against the wall! No one plays policeman here!”

“Hear, hear!”

“We don’t have time to be keeping tabs on them!”

“It’s not our job to police them!”

“Well said!”

“If they want to play along – there’s plenty of work, enough for everybody. If not – it’s their choice. Up against the wall, and that’s the end of it.”

“Exactly, comrades, that’s just what I wanted to say. This is now a family affair, as they say. The Central Committee doesn’t need to get involved, they’ve got enough on their plate. We’re not going to put up notices or repeat ourselves. It’s been said and that’s it, right?”

The mustachioed speaker hopped down from the pedestal to a storm of applause.

Comrade Majoie smiled and walked away from the window with a lighter heart. A new eruption of applause and a thunderous “R-r-right!” drew him toward the last window. Comrade Majoie stole a glance back at the table. Duffy was still giving his report. Majoie tiptoed to the furthest window, leaned on the sill, and listened.

Down below, from a wooden crate that had appeared out of nowhere, a broad-shouldered farmhand with a pointy nose was bellowing away.

“Comrades! At this very moment our comrades in the Central Committee are deliberating on how to keep Paris for ourselves, to keep from handing it over to the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. The main hitch, comrades, is our provisions, mouths to feed. We’ve got a hell of a lot of them, and with food it’s the opposite. I don’t think we should bother our comrades from the Central Committee with this matter, comrades. We have starved, comrades, for the bourgeoisie of course, for their sake, and now we can starve for our own sake, for our workers’ soviets. But we won’t surrender Paris to the bourgeoisie!”

“Right you are!”

“We didn’t fight to get it just to give it up!”

“And what about us? Right back to the slammer? We’re no idiots! We’ll hang in there!”

“The people know how to starve!”

“Comrades, Soviet Russia faced worse starvation in the ring of the imperialist blockade, but it survived and went on to build the first socialist republic. Is the French proletariat any worse off than the Russians?”

“Everyone’s got the same stomachs.”

“And didn’t the Commune starve? They had to eat rats, but they didn’t give up.”

“Right!”

“No sense in idle talk, comrades. We’ll just hold out and that’s that. Just wait and see how the proletariat brings up the rear to help when they find out we’ve got Paris in the palm of our hands. We’ll wait a month, or a year if we have to. If we’re careful with our provisions, we can make it for a month or two. If necessary, we’ll hold out longer. I saw for myself, comrades, that the bourgeoisie left us quite a bit in the grain elevators. If we play our cards right and keep our hands off the grain, we should be able to stretch it out till spring – and after that, piece of cake. We’ve got as much free space as we need in the city. The soil isn’t all that bad. If we sow grain in the spring, by the end of summer we’ll have a whole new field of crops. We could hold out for as many years as we like that way. The bourgeoisie won’t lift a finger – they’ll chicken out, all they think about is the plague. And meanwhile, we’ll cause them so much trouble they won’t know which way’s up. The main thing to do here, comrades, is to hold strong.”

“Of course we’ll hold out, why shouldn’t we?”

“We survived on prison grub, now we’ll survive just as well on our own.”

“We’ll survive all right!”

“We haven’t let one master die just to give power to another!”

Comrade Majoie turned away from the window. His ear caught the calm voice of Comrade Courreau:

“…our armor of plague offers better protection from European intervention than any army we could have. The X-ray doesn’t exist that’s capable of telling from afar if the plague in Paris is eradicated, or if it’s raging as fiercely as ever…”

Thousands of excited voices roared in the square below.

Comrade Majoie flicked away his cigarette and hurried back to his spot at the table. He saw from the looks of concentration on his comrades’ faces that the final act was beginning. The face of the speaker wasn’t turned to him, but he could tell that the gravelly voice belonged to Maraq.

“Comrades, in a moment we’re going to put Comrade Courreau’s motion to a vote. The fate of the French proletariat, perhaps even the European proletariat, hangs on the outcome. Let each of us weigh his own conscience. Do we have the right to hand over our own lives, and those of thirty thousand of our comrades, to the hands of the industrialists and imperialists, in the hopes of mercy and amnesty? Do we have the right to squander this singular cataclysm in human history, this plague-broom that has swept Paris clean of the bourgeoisie and the magnates? Does fear of hunger, want, and isolation in the grip of the blockade give us the right to forego this opportunity to raise the foundations of a model commune in the heart of Europe, on the site of its former capital, the capital of bankers and prostitutes – a commune that will light the way for the proletariat of all countries like a pillar of fire, the first firebrand of the world revolution? Have we the right to forgo this historic mission, which our very circumstances have thrust upon us? Comrade Chairman, please put Courreau’s motion to a vote.”

Comrade Gaillard spoke up in a steady voice:

“Comrades, I am putting Comrade Courreau and Comrade Maraq’s motion to a vote. Who’s for? Please raise your hands.”

Twelve hands rose.

Comrade Duffy abstained.

“Comrade Courreau’s motion is passed,” Gaillard laconically announced.

They proceeded to the remaining topics on the day’s agenda.

III

An animated crowd was still burbling on the square outside when the first committee members appeared in the doorway to the ministry. Someone bellowed:

“They’re coming!”

The crowd fell silent, swayed, and cracked open in a zigzag, only to close up again, swallowing the people exiting the building. For a moment the rafts of heads bobbed around the spot like ripples from a stone. Soon the people who were sucked in started to flow out, one by one, onto the reefs of the monuments protruding above the surface. Their words were inaudible, you could only see the violent gestures of their hands slicing the air, as if twelve demented conductors wanted to capture the chaotic din of the polyphonic sea into the harmonious notations of a score.

A bony man was speaking from the plinth of the Strasbourg Virgin. The ongoing flood of applause dappled his face with great drops of sweat.

“Instead of the plague, which was to have spread across the entire world, but in fact only made room to start building anew, we hereby ignite the great plague of the idea that will spread across this old continent in a sea of cleansing fire, scorching the armies, cordons, and borders. Paris, the first to show Europe the great Commune, will be first to blow the winds of change through all of Europe!…”

Leavened by the yeast of their enthusiasm, the crowd swelled and boiled over with a refrain of The Internationale. The thin, spindly man was carried forward, directionless, on swiftly flowing shoulders like a cork swept by a current.

The rushing human waves poured into the pools of squares and the straits of alleyways.

To tear this highly combustible crowd from its unbridled elation and channel it into concrete action, they had to yank out its seams and splice it with the scissors of organization.

By the afternoon, the mass had been segmented, yoked once more by the iron clamp of discipline, and was a viable source of power.

The first task was to clear the streets of the rotting corpses, which were threatening to cause a new wave of infection. There was no question of burying such a mass of bodies or of burning them in small impromptu crematoriums, so it was resolved to cremate them in the open air.

For the next three days, small divisions of shaven headed, disciplined troops made gigantic pyres out of furniture and waste paper in the squares of Paris and piled the corpses on top. Work was completed on the fourth day. The mounds were doused with gasoline and oil and set alight.

There was no wind to put the neighboring buildings at risk. The fire punched the sky with a black spiral of smoke, and the burning heavens collapsed like a thatched roof in flames, covering the city with a fur cap of soot.

On September 8, newspapers all over the world carried news of the fire in Paris. Crowds gathered on the hills and highlands of France to see it for themselves. The black geyser of smoke gushed hundreds of feet up into the sky. It was an unforgettable sight.

A brave French pilot hit upon the idea of flying over burning Paris, but was forced by the plumes of caustic smoke to turn back, and was unable to say anything beyond the fact that Paris was ablaze from end to end.

Kindly old Grandma Europe was touched that day by the fate of the unfortunate city – and it was not crocodile tears she shed. Elderly gentlemen all around the world wistfully recalled the days of their youth: the Moulin Rouge and Maxim’s, midinettes and mannequins. From high on their pulpits, priests made vague references to the Lord’s wrath and exhorted penance. In the Chamber of Deputies, the gray-haired, immortal Briand railed against the communists.

The following day, the Continent’s radios picked up the first signals from Paris after a long period of silence. The bulletins reported on the fire, the disorder, and the raging epidemic.

The events of the following months – during which the daily reports from Paris were as bleak as ever – turned French attention away from their capital for a long time.

Taking advantage of the turmoil in France, Germany categorically refused to make further reparation payments, as the Dawes Plan had outlined, on the pretext that their economy was struggling. War was in the air. The bourgeois newspapers, spearheaded by the socialists, called for the occupation of Berlin, to settle the score with their unruly neighbor. The sailors of the Mediterranean fleet responded with a revolt, hoisting red flags up their masts. The Lyon garrison clearly sympathized with them, and joined with the workers to demonstrate against war.

An emergency session of the League of Nations concluded with memos filling two cartloads of official stationery, an all-out attempt to mollify the swelling conflict. Under pressure from the working masses, the French government was forced into a compromise, thereby undermining the integrity of the Treaty of Versailles. The immediate threat of war seemed to have been averted.

Radio Paris continued to report the escalation of the plague and riots erupting in the infested city. According to the most recent news, the eastern quarters of Paris had been overtaken by an anarcho-nihilist cult bent on destroying the city. Three government aircraft that tried to fly over Paris were shot down by these alleged cultists. This deplorable incident took away the last of the government’s desire to meddle with the plague-infested city, which from then on was abandoned to its cruel fate.

Months passed. France, a floozy with a short memory, slowly came to terms with the loss of its beloved capital city. More painful than the loss itself was the absence of tourists stuffed with dollars, who had proved quite difficult to lure back. It was imperative that they create a new capital as soon as possible, one that was in no way inferior to Paris in terms of its comforts and titillating attractions. A special consortium was established for the expansion and exploitation of Lyon.

Upscale, eight-story hotels soared up on either side of Lyon’s boulevards with lightning speed. Theaters, dance halls and cabarets opened up, and lavish brothels, for men and women both, sprang up from nowhere. Historical monuments were hastily transported from all corners of France.

Telegraphs trumpeted the sensational news of the new and glittering capital to all corners of the globe in the blink of an eye.

This extraordinary news met with a fevered response worldwide. Every country hustled to pitch in their two cents to the growing population of Lyon.

America, France’s obliging ally, who had overcome its fear of the ongoing fires of the plague in the name of a profitable transaction, daily sent off huge ocean liners, loaded to the tops of their funnels with armies of jazz bands, dancing girls, hotel maître d’s, stewards, and grooms. The more courageous Americans were already packing their bags to take the first Cook voyage and to be the first to set foot on a re-conquered patch of Europe.

From all the world over, cocottes, madams, and common prostitutes came rushing to the Rhone on serpentine rails at breakneck speed, a live cargo of all nations and races, for whom the thoughtful French government was obliged to introduce additional train services.

In the shadows of the brand new homes, popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm of dollars, there appeared the immortal potbellied hoteliers.

The clatter of advertisements and signboards being hammered in place filled the entire city.

Day and night, from the streets and the alleyways, the familiar inscriptions of nighttime hotels blinked incessantly, enticing passersby. And on an evening filled with all the clamor of a Javanese orchestra, after a long hiatus, the fiery windmill of the Moulin Rouge spun its eternal circle where it had been reconstructed in Lyon, and Europe breathed a collective sigh of relief, as if to say: “So it’s really spinning.”

Champagne flowed in a pearl-white, all-cleansing stream through the gutters of the new Montmartre, and emaciated, ragged workers flowed in a black stream from the evacuating villages to the factories.

In the autumn of the second year, the government – the forty-sixth in a row – was stabilizing the franc. France’s lousy economic condition had made people stop buying automobiles. Factories were being threatened with closure. The workforce was being cut by half everywhere you looked. To avoid any commotion, people were being dismissed a handful at a time and from different divisions, staggered throughout the day. Hiring more workers was out of the question.

In the Chamber of Deputies, a white-maned socialist by the name of Paul Boncour was forwarding a motion to double the police force.

One beautiful August evening, the streets teeming with that random and unsynchronized throng of extras cast by Europe’s rickety film projector onto the screen of Lyon’s boulevards every evening, on the corner of Rue Vivienne and Boulevard Montmartre, Jeanette informed Pierre that she would most definitely be requiring a pair of evening slippers.

IV

The dun London fog slowly crept across Europe, spreading its vapors of damp toxic gasses.

During those years, scholars noted a marked change in the European climate. In the winter a slushy snow covered Nice, and the astonished palm trees, their leaves undulating under the frost like odd flat-chested skirt suits, swayed a phantom tango.

In London there was fog as always. The lampposts burned in the foggy daylight, and bristling figures flitted through the milky gelatinous haze – blind submarines with strangely short periscopes.

Londoners must have sponges for lungs, to soak up the fog and breathe it out, like factory smoke through pointy-faced chimneys.

In the noon fog, the pointy faces of the chimneys turned skyward and howled like dogs sniffing a corpse, then millions of human sponges poured out of the factories, the offices, and the government buildings to suck in the fog and carry it back to the six-story anthills of their offices.

Bloated ships roared into the coal-black ports daily, always at the same time, and on these ships soldiers, civil servants, and ordinary citizens of the British Empire floated off to their dominions, so that there, under the sweltering skies of India, they could exhale a bit of the fog that spreads across their land in a leaden vapor – for the sun-scorched Hindus, the London fog is more toxic than poison gas.

That summer a fine, prickly rain fell incessantly in Europe, and in August a fog swam in from the shores of Brittany. The fog pulled a heavy veil over the Channel, hugged the green coastline of Normandy, and pushed further inland, wrapping objects and cities in its soft, gray suede. The fuzzy gray puffs crawled through the valleys like smoke. Scientists predicted a damp autumn and ended their prophecies there, unlike the peasants, who recalled that smoke clings to the ground before a storm and began muttering of future calamities.

In the Channel, steamships blundering in the fog hailed one another with a constant scream of sirens.

In Dauville, the fog blew away the vacationers who had come to the beach to soak up the sun, and the greedy tongues of the sea lapped the white sand as if it were cold mashed potatoes left on a plate. Tourists wandered around the hotel terraces with tussled hair, flannel scarves wrapped tight around their necks.

In the restaurants, cafés, and hotel dance halls the jazz music started its barking in the morning, and the unfortunate half-naked vacationers, dripping with the yellow, cadaverous light of the chandeliers, in dresses not unlike swimsuits, convulsed in syncopated bliss, latching like crabs onto the chests of the male divers, who shook themselves as they danced.

In the morning, the express train leapt out of the gray cloud in an electric zigzag, descending upon the station on the lightning-rods of the rails. Two men in black top hats were waiting on the platform, accompanied by some twenty photographers and a restless mob of journalists. A clean-shaven, grayish gentleman in a French kepi stepped out of the first-class car, accompanied by a few younger gentlemen. The men in top hats ceremonially rushed to greet him. Camera shutters clicked. The gentlemen tipped their hats politely and began speaking in English. Two cars were waiting at the entrance. They swayed gently under the weight of the gentlemen settling in their seats, and then drifted off into the fog. Reporters hopped into the first available taxis and gave pursuit, lured by the sweet hope of an interview. The gentleman who had arrived was the Prime Minister of Great Britain.

An hour later the prime minister’s secretary went down to a hotel lobby swarming with journalists. He was dressed in a charmingly discreet pullover and a loose-fitting English suit, and with a politely bored expression on his face he informed the persistent reporters that the prime minister had arrived in Dauville with no particular political plans in mind, simply to relax for a few days from the rigors of affairs of state, and that he was quite distressed to see that the weather was not shaping up.

The reporters took all this down to the letter. They knew perfectly well that the President of the Council of Ministers of France had arrived from Lyon just the day before. They’d met him at the station, followed him to the very same hotel, and heard him make nearly identical remarks. They also knew that two days earlier a Polish emissary had come by train from the Belgian border to Dauville, though only one man in a top hat had come to the station to meet him, and no photographers or journalists were in sight.

So having urgently transcribed the secretary’s statement, they all scrambled to send their editors news about the important political summit between the representatives of the three great powers. Then they ran back with all possible haste to lie in wait for the tight-lipped diplomats.

Both statesmen remained in their suites all morning. They ordered room service for breakfast, and each devoured theirs with gusto. At four o’clock in the afternoon, a reporter dressed as a butler noticed the British prime minister himself going to the bathroom, where he remained for a considerable time before returning to his quarters.

It was only around six in the evening that, to the delight of all the reporters patiently lurking behind their doors, the French president and his secretary left their suites in the left wing of the hotel and, without straying from their paths, headed straight toward the right wing, to the suites of the British prime minister. No matter how hard the reporters strained their eyes, they could not discern any kind of definite expression on his face. One of the reporters did notice, however, that the president was softly whistling a popular melody while passing the door where he hid.

The visit dragged on. Three times a reporter disguised as a bellboy brought cocktails to suite No. 6 and silently busied himself with the glassware for a long time. The whole time he was present the statesmen discussed the weather, complained about the poor harvests in their countries, and exchanged opinions on the most recent races at Wembley. In the end, the reporter accomplished nothing, though he did break a glass from his eavesdropping and his lack of professional training.

At around eight that evening a call was made, and ten minutes later the Polish emissary was knocking at the door to suite No. 6. Aristocratic in bearing and stylishly disheveled, a careful part ran right down to his collar between his sparse clumps of hair.

Cocktails were served once more. The conversation proceeded in English. The virtues of various types of cigars were discussed. The Polish emissary absent-mindedly brushed flakes of ash from his sleeve.

The reporters behind the doors impatiently opened and closed their pocket cameras. They were eager to capture the facial expressions of the diplomats leaving the summit and they worried that, with the poor lighting in the corridor, this historic moment might slip through their fingers.

Finally, at around nine o’clock, the door of suite No. 6 opened and the Polish emissary came out, awkwardly adjusting his immaculate snow-white cuffs. His was absolutely expressionless, as befits the face of a diplomat. The Polish emissary took the elevator to his suite.

Only a good half hour after his departure did the French president appear in the doorway of suite No. 6, shown to the door by his English colleague. His face was slightly puffy and pink, like that of a man who has smoked too many cigars. Some of the less experienced reporters mistook this for a flush of excitement. Unfortunately, the lighting in the corridor turned out to be woefully inadequate; these keen reporters were clearly not fated to capture for posterity the statesmen’s facial expressions on this momentous evening.

Having trailed the French president back to his suite, the journalists dispersed: some to the post office, others to the restaurant to polish off Wienerschnitzel and scribble out their articles, and still others headed off for some dancing, to stretch their legs after a hard day’s work. Both heads of state dismissed their servants and probably went off to rest. The political day had come to an end. Nothing of interest could occur until the next day. The last reporter, who hoped to be the first at his post the following day, exited the hotel.

And this was a pity. Had he only kept waiting till midnight, he would most certainly have noted an incident of some interest. A car pulled up to the hotel at ten to twelve. The Polish emissary came down the stairs, preceded by a bellboy carrying his suitcase. The emissary and the suitcase vanished through the car door. The car drove off to the train station.

A week later, buried deep on the back pages of the morning dailies, the word “Poland” appeared in print for the first time. By the end of the week the “Polish question” was cropping up with lightning speed, like quicksilver in the tubes of the newspaper columns, filling whole pages and creeping toward the headlines. The news became more and more detailed.

There had suddenly appeared in the territory of Poland – God knows how – a newly contrived hetman, who was planning a march on Ukraine to liberate her from the yoke of Bolshevik rule. In his many interviews, this hetman proclaimed the resurrection of a “self-reliant” Ukraine, joined to Poland in its historical union. With the silent consent of the Polish government, this freshly baked hetman assembled a Ukrainian liberation army on the territory of the Polish state. The Polish newspapers sounded the reveille. They recalled the all-too-recent historical borders… The government maintained a dignified silence.

When it seemed as though the situation was reaching its climax, the government of the Soviet Union addressed the Polish government with a gentle note of caution, requesting that, in the interests of European peace and good relations between neighbors, the rabble-rousing organizations threatening the peace and integrity of the Soviet Union should immediately be disbanded.

The bourgeois press saw this note as outlandish provocation and began alluding to war. The Polish government was spurred to make an unparliamentary reply. An exchange of harsh ultimatums ensued.

A violent northwest wind blew in Lyon that day, and shredded scraps of fog flapped like wet underwear on invisible clotheslines. A gale furiously hurtled down streets, knocking unwary passersby off their feet. Wind-tossed hats flapped in the air like heavy birds, and headless pedestrians hopped strangely after them like rubber balls.

At around six p.m., special newspaper supplements appeared on the streets. Pedestrians twirled like tops at the intersections, clutching at papers that slipped between their fingers. They fluttered their awkward newspaper wings like butterflies trapped under the impenetrable net of fog.

Behind the thick glass of the café windows, hefty, shiftless clientele played Preference and, solemnly choosing their suit, poked at their hearts with sharp spades of spades.

“Whist.”

“Naturally.”

“But the trump is ours.”

“Yes, monsieur, this is no laughing matter. Those bandits have provoked the Polish army into crossing their border. They’re clearly threatening the integrity of our loyal ally, Poland. France won’t stand for this kind of provocation.”

“Pass.”

“Tell me about it!”

“We’ll aid our Polish friends with troops and ammunition. We’ll drive out the Bolsheviks.”

“We’ll strike with our hearts! Yes, monsieur, that’s the only way to finally return Europe to the old, prewar order. I always used to tell that to my deputy, Juliet. We’ll never be rid of inflation until we finish off the Soviets.”

“Queen of spades.”

The wind was driving hard outside, it lashed the thick panes of glass, bounced upward, somersaulted over the rooftops, tripped, got tangled in the spider webs of antennae, and, freeing itself, pushed onward, while the vibrating antennae resounded long and dolefully.

In the industrialists’ club that evening, the guests were playing Baccarat and indulging heartily in the buffet as usual, chewing slowly and drizzling Chablis on plump Portuguese oysters. In the smoking lounge, tuxedoed gentlemen sat in comfortable leather armchairs, smoked cigars and cigarettes and held lively discussions.

Then a manager entered with two butlers, carrying a long scroll. When unraveled, it turned out to be a map of Europe. The butlers hung it on the wall.

The manager turned toward the graying gentlemen spread out comfortably on the couch and jovially explained:

“When there’s a war on, I know you like to have a map at the ready. During the last war we had to change maps six times. They were totally mutilated by the thumbtack holes.”

The men gathered in a circle around the map.

In the corner, on a sofa, a bald gentleman in a monocle was speaking to a gray man with muttonchops:

“Reportedly the English fleet set sail yesterday evening for St. Petersburg?…”

The man with muttonchops leaned confidentially toward his neighbor.

“A good friend of mine, the Minister of Internal Affairs, told me yesterday – just between you and me, of course – that the government plans to announce a mobilization tomorrow. A coalition of the whole civilized world is being formed, something like a crusade against those communist scoundrels. The Bolsheviks will be crushed in the next three weeks, and a rightful ruler will be restored to Russia. A provisional government made up of serious Russian émigré statesmen has been formed in London with the approval of the British and French governments. There’s even talk of…” The man with muttonchops leaned in closer and concluded what he was saying in an inaudible whisper.

“Indeed!” exclaimed the bald gentleman. “Yes, that’s quite conceivable. I, for one, have held that belief for ages. French industry will never get rid of this upheaval as long as the Soviets exist to the east. Dispatching the Soviets and bringing order to Russia will be a decisive blow to our local communists; it will mean a victory on our internal industrial front. All of level-headed France would not pale before sacrificing any number of victims for this cause…”

In the deserted streets outside, the blustery wind raced a lone motorcycle, and scraps of special supplements blew about like the gigantic snowflakes of a monster blizzard. Phantom-like policemen awkwardly danced on the street corners in their black oilcloth hoods.

The electricity burned bright in the print rooms of the workers’ daily; the linotypes clattered and the tar-covered typesetters galloped the equine fingers of their calloused hands across the tiny cobblestones of the keys like some strange virtuosi. The levers and scatterbrained letters now leapt up, now dropped, like soldiers instantly falling into line. And then, like divers from a springboard, the type thrust downward into the pool of liquid lead, a moment later emerging with the terse line of a sentence:

Today, at the hour of 12:00 noon, the first trans-

Again, letter chased letter, and, heated from their sprint, came out once more with another slender line:

port of arms and ammunition sent from Lyon to Poland

And further:

was held up 50 miles from the German border owing to a collective strike of railway workers, who refused to admit any kind of transport sent to fight the workers’ Soviet Union.

Period.

“Way to go, boys!” smiled the typesetter.

The fingers flashed once more across the steps of the keyboard. Again, one after another, the letters climbed like acrobats along the lines, along the scaffolding of the levers, and moments later plunged headfirst into the bubbling pool, and emerged once more in another inseparable chain:

At 3:00 p.m. a decree was sent to town to mobilize the railways.

Immediately followed by:

The Central Committee of the United Labor Unions has called a general strike for tomorrow.

“Comrade, set a call in pica from the Party C.C. to the working masses.”

Again the keyboard clattered:

Comrades! The bourgeois French government, under the beck and call of the English capitalists…

The roar of voices, the stamp of feet, and the rattle of machine guns came from the entrance to the print shop. The staircase was swarming with men in navy blue.

The police.

That evening the red stains of posters appeared on the walls of buildings: The Communist Party’s Central Committee was calling upon workers and soldiers.

Around seven o’clock special supplements bringing sensational news appeared on the boulevards of all the cities of Europe.

A British plane flying from London to Lyon lost its way in the thick fog over the Channel, flew off course, and unexpectedly found itself over Paris. It miraculously escaped being fired at and managed, in spite of a broken wing, to land beyond the cordon.

What the English pilot saw and reported was so unfathomable that even the tabloid press, which was not known for its adherence to scruples, conveyed it with a heavy dose of skepticism.

Wanting to establish where he was, the pilot had flown at only three hundred feet above the ground. By the time he had realized he was above Paris, it was too late – his curiosity had gotten the better of his caution.

He had flown from the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. There was a southerly wind blowing the fog from the city, so everything was clear as a bell. The Paris that sprawled before his eyes was not burned in the slightest. The buildings, palaces, and monuments – everything seemed to be standing where they had always been, and yet he was also struck by all the changes that had taken place. The first thing the pilot noticed were the countless radio towers soaring above the city. The air was sliced on all sides by an infinity of antenna wires.

Passing the Arc de Triomphe, the pilot flew along the Champs-Elysées. What he saw there defied all probability.

Where once the Place de la Concorde had stretched with a measureless sheet of polished asphalt, from La Madeleine to the Chambre des Députés, from Champs-Elysées to the Tuileries, a meadow of ripe grain now rippled in the gentle southerly wind. This grain was being gathered by mechanized harvesters driven by brawny, tanned men in white undershirts. Men and women dressed in the same light harvesting clothes were nimbly piling the ready sheaves onto a waiting truck. At the edges of the field on all sides, women rested and breast-fed their infants.

Seeing the airplane overhead, the harvesters stopped working, turned their heads upward, and gesticulated wildly.

Flying over the Tuileries Gardens the pilot noticed a colony of a few thousand children playing in identical clothing, smocks and small red caps, like a field of poppies right beside the fields of grain.

Where the Luxembourg Gardens had once sprawled were now rows of cauliflower growing white in the sun in a chessboard of colorful plots, a gigantic vegetable garden.

The pilot was so astonished by what he saw that he left further observations aside and flew a beeline over the city to hurry and share his discovery with his superiors.

Over the Seine, right where the Métro Bridge spans it with a breakneck leap, he saw a train running across the viaduct, hauling cargo wagons loaded with goods of some kind. There was almost no one on the streets, only in the fields and in the gardens – yet the slender streams of smoke coming from the factory chimneys indicated the area was pulsing with intense labor.

Flying over the southern suburbs, the pilot came under fire, and was forced to pull up. It was only through some skillful maneuvering that he was able to escape without greater harm.

The pilot maintained that Paris was surrounded by formidable fortifications, and swore that he had spotted long-range artillery on the bastions.

The pilot’s incredible story was heard on radios across the globe that very same day.

Before evening the sensation of the day all across France was the mysterious people harvesting grain on Place de la Concorde and breeding whole ranks of children. Frivolous songs were sung about them in all of Lyon’s cabarets.

V

The events of the following day occurred at a truly dizzying speed.

At nine in the morning a decree appeared in Lyon ordering a general mobilization. In spite of the martial law and the prohibition on assembly, the streets were bursting with an agitated crowd, pouring out in processions, fulminating against war. A patriotic fascist militia was organized ad hoc to help the police keep the city in line. Flocks of reserves cut through the streets, singing The Internationale. Three armored ships docked at Toulon floated out to sea, waving red flags. In the cities: unrest and disturbance. A regiment ordered to march barricaded themselves in their barracks, hanging red kerchiefs from their windows.

At noon, the newspapers reported that a British squadron had set sail for Leningrad. The German government declared that they would maintain absolute neutrality in the ensuing conflict.

The general strike blocked evening editions of newspapers all across Europe. The feverish crowds, hungry for information, started mobbing the loudspeakers hung outside of department stores, parks, and editorial offices to await the latest bulletins. At 7:15 sharp, the speakers coughed up the station’s first broadcast signals.

And then, unexpectedly, over the minor accompaniment of the monotonous litany of numbers, smothering it like the brass roar of a trumpet, a muted string orchestra suddenly sounded, and then a booming voice:

“Hello! Hello! Paris speaking!”

These words were so startling that the crowds surged and fell silent, uncertain if they hadn’t fallen victim to some kind of aural hallucination.

For a moment all you could hear from the speakers was a muddy echo, counting “eight, nine, ten…” The crowd leaned closer, feverish with anticipation. Then, through the sound of the countdown, the sonorous, metallic bass was heard once again:

“Hello! Paris speaking!”

By now there could be no doubt. Pushing and thrashing, people pressed closer to the speakers. The accompaniment fell silent. A moment later the same voice rang out a third time:

“Paris speaking!”

After the unbelievable testimonials of the English pilot, this sounded like the key to a baffling riddle. A second later the voice rang out again, emphatic and deafening:

“Paris speaking! At present, the city of Paris holds seven radio stations built over the past two years, with an average capacity of 500 kilowatts apiece. We have set our machines to the frequencies of all the Continent’s most popular stations. Tuning in to any of these, you will have no choice but to hear our voice, several times more powerful than their antennae…”

The words fell silent. For a second you could hear the broadcast of the smothered station, laconically announcing that the Japanese were declaring war against the Soviet Union. A moment later the same voice drowned everything out again:

“Workers! Soldiers! Peasants! This is the revolutionary government of Paris speaking. The Paris you thought dead is alive. The rumors of the raging epidemic are all lies. The Paris epidemic was eradicated two years ago. The only survivors were the thousands-strong Parisian proletariat who had been thrown in prison during the May crackdowns. The proletariat survived amid the ruins of the old Paris through their isolation in prison, and during these years they have erected a new Paris – a free workers’ commune. Seeking to ga… the ti… start…”

Through the tangled web of words came the jaunty chords of a piano:

crooned the tenor from the smothered station.

“…the imperialist war, brought on by your bourgeois governments against the world’s first worker-peasant state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, thrusting a blade into the chest of the revolutionary proletariat of all nations, forces us to break this artificial isolation for the first time and turn… direc…”

the stubborn tenor warbled on.

“This is the workers’ Paris. Workers! Peasants! People bound by the yoke! A war against the USSR is a war against you, a war against our commune that you shall defend, as an international revolutionary bastion in the sea of capitalist Europe. Pick up your arms! All for revolutionary Paris! For dis… pea… with the Uni…”

“…live… your revolution of workers and pea…! Down with the mili… pitalist… live… vil war! Long live Paris, capital of the French Socialist Republic of Soviets!”

The black maws of the speakers blared the brassy fanfare of The Internationale.

The crowds were consumed, it seemed, by a frenzy. People ran, shoving and trampling one another. Thousands of mouths agape with astonishment picked up the lingering refrain of The Internationale.

And under the swollen sails of the song the masses shuddered like titanic ships, creaking in their joints, swaying in the shallows of the roadways and heavily pushing forward.