Not Safe After Dark

APRIL IN PARIS

The girl sitting outside the cafe reminds me of April. She has the same long hennaed hair, which she winds around her index finger in the same abstracted way. She is waiting for someone clearly – a lover perhaps – and as she waits she smokes, holding her cigarette in the same way, taking the same short, hurried puffs, that April used to do. With her free hand, she alternates between taking sips of milky pastis and tapping her cigarette packet on the table. She is smoking Marlboro, as everyone in Paris seems to do these days. Back then it was all Gitanes, Gauloises and Disque Bleus.

Still, it wasn’t smoking that killed April; it was love.

It is late September, and though the weather is mild, it is still too cold outside for an old man like me, with blood as thin and as lacking in nutrients as workhouse gruel. Instead, I sit inside the little cafe on the Boulevard St Germain over a pichet of red wine, just watching the people come and go. The young people. I have spent most of my life surrounded by the young, and though I grow inexorably older every year, they always seem to stay young. Immortal youth. Like Tithonus, I am ‘a white-haired shadow roaming like a dream’. But unlike Tennyson’s luckless narrator, who gained eternal life but not eternal youth, I am not immortal.

Six months, perhaps less, the doctors say. Something is growing inside me; my cells are mutating. As yet I feel little pain, though my appetite has diminished and I often suffer from extreme weariness.

Dying, I find, lends an edge to living, gives a clarity and a special, golden hue to the quotidian scenes parading before me: a swarthy man with a briefcase, glancing at his watch, speeding up, late for an important appointment; a woman chastising her little girl at the corner, wagging her finger, the girl crying and stamping her foot; a distracted priest stumbling briefly as he walks up the steps to the church across the boulevard.

Dying accentuates the beauty of the young, sets their energy in relief, enhances the smooth glow of their unwrinkled skin. But dying does not make me bitter. I am resigned to my fate; I have come to the end of my threescore and ten; I have seen enough. If you wish to travel, my doctors told me, do it now while you’re still strong enough. So here I am, revisiting the scene of my one and only great amour.

April. She always pronounced it Ap-reel. When I think of her, I still hear Thelonious Monk playing ‘April in Paris’, hesitantly at first, feeling his way into the song, reluctant to define the theme, then worrying away at it and, once finding it, altering it so much that the music becomes his own, only to be abandoned finally.

Of course, April didn’t give a tinker’s for Thelonious Monk. She listened to him dutifully, as they all did, for they were the heirs of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to whom Monk, Bird, Trane, Miles and Mingus were gods, sacred and cool. But April’s generation had its own gods – the Doors, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan – gods of words and images as well as of music, and it was they who provided the soundtrack to which I lived during my year as a visiting lecturer in American literature at the Sorbonne in 1968.

This cafe hasn’t changed much. A lick of paint, perhaps, if that. It probably hasn’t changed much since Hemingway and Fitzgerald used to hang out around here. Even the waiters are probably the same. It was here I first met April, of course (why else would I come here?), one fine evening towards the end of March that year, when I was still young enough to bear the slight chill of a clear spring evening.

That April was beautiful almost goes without saying. I remember her high cheekbones, her smooth, olive complexion, dark, watchful eyes and rich, moist lips, down-turned at the edges, often making her look sulky or petulant when she was far from it. I remember also how she used to move with grace and confidence when she remembered, but how the gaucheness of late adolescence turned her movements into a country girl’s gait when she was at her most unselfconscious. She was tall, slim and long-legged, and her breasts were small, round and high. The breasts of a Cranach nude.

We met, as I say, one late March evening in 1968 at this cafe, the Café de la Lune, where I was then sitting with the usual group: Henri, Nadine, Brad, Brigitte, Alain and Paul. This was only days after Daniel Cohn-Bendit and seven other students had occupied the dean’s office at Nanterre to protest against the recent arrest of six members of the National Vietnam Committee, an event that was to have cataclysmic effects on us all not long afterwards. Much of the time in those days we spoke of revolution, but that evening we were discussing, I remember quite clearly, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, when in she walked, wearing a woolly jumper and close-fitting, bell-bottomed jeans with flowers embroidered around the bells. She was carrying a bulky leather shoulder bag, looking radiant and slightly lost, glancing around for someone she knew.

It turned out that she knew Brad, an American backpacker who had attached himself to our group. People like Brad had a sort of fringe, outlaw attraction for the students. They seemed, with their freedom to roam and their contempt for rules and authority, to embody the very principles that the students themselves, with their heavy workloads, exams and future careers, could only imagine, or live vicariously. There were always one or two Brads around. Some dealt in drugs to make a living; Brad, though he spoke a good revolution, lived on a generous allowance wired regularly by his wealthy Boston parents via Western Union.

April went up to Brad and kissed him on both cheeks, a formal French gesture he seemed to accept with thinly veiled amusement. In his turn, Brad introduced her to the rest of us. That done, we resumed our discussion over another bottle of wine, the tang of Gauloises and café noir infusing the chill night air, and April surprised me by demonstrating that she had not only read Tender Is the Night, but that she had thought about it, too, even though she was a student of history, not of literature.

‘Don’t you think those poor young girls are terribly used?’ she said. ‘I mean, Nicole is Dick’s patient. He should be healing her, not sleeping with her. And the way Rosemary is manipulated by her mother… I’d go so far as to say that the mother seems to be pimping for her. Those films she made -’ and here April gave her characteristic shrug, no more than a little shiver rippling across her shoulders – ‘they were no doubt made to appeal to older men.’ She didn’t look at me as she said this, but my cheeks burned nonetheless.

‘Have you read Day of the Locust?’ Henri, one of the other students, chimed in. ‘If you want to know about how Hollywood warps people, that’s your place to start. There’s a mother in there who makes Rosemary’s look like a saint.’

‘Huxley?’ asked Nadine, not our brightest.

‘No,’ said April. ‘That was After Many a Summer. Day of the Locust was Nathanael West, I think. Yes?’

Here, she looked directly at me, the professor, for the first time, turned on me the full blaze of her beauty. She knew she was right, of course, but she still deferred to me out of politeness.

‘That’s right,’ I said, smiling, feeling my heart lurch and my soul tingle inside its chains of flesh. ‘Nathanael West wrote Day of the Locust.’

And from that moment on I was smitten.

I told myself not to be a fool, that April was far too young for me, and that a beautiful woman like her couldn’t possibly be interested in a portly, forty-year-old lecturer, even if he did wear faded denim jeans, had a goatee and grew those wisps of hair that remained a little longer than some of his colleagues thought acceptable. But after that first meeting I found myself thinking about April a lot. In fact I couldn’t get her out of my mind. It wasn’t mere lust – though, Lord knows, it was that too – but I loved the sound of her voice, loved the way she twisted strands of hair around her finger as she spoke, the way she smoked her cigarette, loved the passion of her arguments, the sparkle of her laughter, the subtle jasmine of her perfume.

Love.

That night, she had left the cafe after about an hour, arm in arm with Brad – young, handsome, rich, footloose and fancy-free Brad – and I had lain awake tormented by images of their passionate love making. I had never felt like that before, never felt so consumed by desire for someone and so racked by pain at the thought of someone else having her. It was as if an alien organism had invaded my body, my very soul, and wrought such changes there that I could hardly cope with more mundane matters, such as teaching and writing, eating and sleeping.

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

I must have gasped out loud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Nowhere special.’

‘Coffee?’

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

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

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

‘I don’t know.’

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

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

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

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

‘What does Brad think?’ I asked.

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

‘And you?’

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

‘Ah, yes. I remember some of them.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Shall I make coffee?’ she asked.

‘There’s only instant.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Try telling that to the police.’

‘You can be so cynical sometimes.’

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

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

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

The revolution had begun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My chance came at the weekend, when the shit really hit the fan.

All week negotiations had been going back and forth between the government and the students. The university stayed closed and the students threatened to ‘liberate’ it. De Gaulle huffed and puffed. The Latin Quarter remained an occupied zone. On Friday the workers threw in their lot with the students and called for a general strike the following Monday. The whole country was on its knees in a way it hadn’t been since the German occupation.

Thus far I had been avoiding the demonstrations, not out of cowardice or lack of commitment, but because I was a British subject not a French one. By the weekend that no longer mattered. It had become a world struggle: us against them. We were fighting for a new world order. I was in. I had a stake. Besides, the university was closed so I didn’t even have a job to protect any more. And perhaps, somewhere deep down, I hoped that heroic deeds on the barricades might win the heart of a fair lady.

So confusing was everything, so long running and spread out the battle, that I can’t remember now whether it was Friday or Saturday. Odd that, the most important night of my life, and I can’t remember what night it was. No matter.

It all started with a march towards the Panthéon, red and black flags everywhere, the ‘Internationale’ bolstering our courage. I had found April and Brad earlier, along with Henri, Alain and Brigitte, in the university quadrangle looking at the improvised bookstalls, and we went to the march together. April had her arm linked through mine on one side, and Alain on the other.

It was about half-past nine when things started to happen. I’m not sure what came first, the sharp explosions of the gas grenades or the flash of a Molotov cocktail, but all of a sudden pandemonium broke out, and there was no longer an organized march, only a number of battle fronts.

In the melee, April and I split off, losing Brad and the rest, and we found ourselves among those defending the front on the Boulevard St Michel. Unfortunate drivers, caught in the chaos, pressed down hard on their accelerators, honked their horns and drove through red lights to get away, knocking pedestrians aside as they went. The explosions were all around us now and a blazing CRS van silhouetted figures throwing petrol bombs and pulling up paving stones for the barricades. The restaurants and cafes were all closing hurriedly, waiters ushering clients out into the street and putting up the shutters.

The CRS advanced on us, firing gas grenades continuously. One landed at my feet and I kicked it back at them. I saw one student fall to them, about ten burly police kicking him as he lay and beating him mercilessly with their truncheons. There was nothing we could do. Clouds of gas drifted from the canisters, obscuring our view. We could see distant flames, hear the explosions and the cries, see vague shadows bending to pick up stones to throw at the darkness. The CRS charged. Some of us had come armed with Molotov cocktails and stones, but neither April nor I had any weapons, any means to defend ourselves, so we ran.

We got separated from the others, just the two of us now, and we were both scared. This was the worst the fighting had been so far. The demonstrators weren’t just taking what the CRS dished out, they were fighting back, and that made the police even more vicious. They would show no quarter, neither with a woman nor a foreign national. We could hardly see for the tears streaming from our eyes as we tried to get away from the advancing CRS, who seemed to have every side street blocked off.

‘Come on,’ I said, taking April’s hand in mine. ‘This way.’

We jumped the fence and edged through the pitch-dark Luxembourg Gardens, looking for an unguarded exit. When we found one, we dashed out and across to the street opposite. A group of CRS saw us and turned. Fortunately, the street was too narrow and the buildings were too high for the gas guns. The police fired high in the air and most of the canisters fell harmlessly onto the roofs above us. Nobody gave chase.

Hand in hand, we made our way through the dark back streets to my pension, which, though close to the fighting, seemed so far unscathed. We ran up to my tiny room and locked the door behind us. Our eyes were streaming, and both of us felt a little dizzy and sick from the tear gas, but we also felt elated from the night’s battle. We could still hear the distant explosions and see flashes and flames, like Guy Fawkes Night back in England. Adrenalin buzzed in our veins.

Just as I can’t say exactly what night it was, I can’t say exactly who made the first move. All I remember is that suddenly the room seemed too small for the two of us, our bodies were pressed together and I was tasting those moist, pink lips for the first time, savouring her small, furtive tongue in my mouth. My legs were like jelly.

‘You know when I came here the other morning and you were in bed?’ April said as she unbuttoned my shirt.

‘Yes,’ I said, tugging at her jeans.

She slipped my shirt off my shoulders. ‘I wanted to get into bed with you.’

I unhooked her bra. ‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I didn’t think you wanted me.’

We managed to get mostly undressed before falling onto the bed. I kissed her breasts and ran my hands down her naked thighs. I thought I would explode with ecstasy when she touched me. Then she was under me, and I buried myself in her, heard her sharp gasp of pleasure.

At last, April was mine.

I lived on the memory of April’s body, naked beside me, the two of us joined in love, while the country went insane. I didn’t see her for three days, and even then we were part of a group; we couldn’t talk intimately. That was what things were like then; there was little place for the individual. Everything was chaos. Normal life was on hold, perhaps never to be resumed again.

The university was closed, the campus hardly recognizable. The pillars in the square were plastered with posters of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Che Guevara. There was a general strike. Everything ground to a halt: the Metro, buses, coal production, railways. Everywhere I walked I saw burned-out vans and cars, gutted news kiosks, piles of paving stones, groups of truncheon-swinging CRS. People eating in the cafes had tears streaming down their faces from the remnants of tear gas in the morning-after air.

And every morning was a morning after.

I spotted Brad alone in a side street one night not long after dark, and as I had been wanting to talk to him about April, I thought I might never get a better opportunity. He was on his way to a meeting, he said, but could spare a few minutes. We took the steps down to the Seine by the side of the Pont St Michel, where we were less likely to get hassled by the CRS. It was dark and quiet by the river, though we could hear the crack of gas guns and explosions of Molotovs not so far away.

‘Have you talked to April recently?’ I asked him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘I was wondering if… you know… she’d told you…?’

‘Told me what?’

‘Well…’ I swallowed. ‘About us.’

He stopped for a moment, then looked at me and laughed. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, she did, as a matter of fact.’

I was puzzled by his attitude. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘is that all you have to say?’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Aren’t you angry?’

‘Why should I be angry? It didn’t mean anything.’

I felt an icy fear grip me. ‘What do you mean, it didn’t mean anything?’

‘You know. It was just a quickie, a bit of a laugh. She said she got excited by the street fighting and you happened to be the nearest man. It’s not the first time, you know. I don’t expect April to be faithful or any of that bourgeois crap. She’s her own woman.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said it didn’t mean anything. You don’t think she could be serious about someone like you, do you? Come off it, Richard, with your tatty jeans and your little goatee beard. You think you’re a real hip intellectual, but you’re nothing but a joke. That’s all you were to her. A quickie. A laugh. A joke. She came straight to me afterwards for a real-’

The blow came from deep inside me and my fist caught him on the side of his jaw. I heard a sharp crack, distinct from the sound of a distant gas gun, and he keeled over into the Seine. We were under a bridge and it was very dark. I stopped, listened and looked around, but I could see no one, hear only the sounds of battle in the distance. Quickly, my blood turning to ice, I climbed the nearest stairs and re-entered the fray.

I had never imagined that love could turn to hatred so quickly. Though I had fantasized about getting rid of Brad many times, I had never really intended to harm him, and certainly not in the way, or for the reason, that I did. I had never thought of myself as someone capable of killing another human being.

They pulled his body out of the Seine two days later, and the Anarchists claimed that he had been singled out and murdered by the CRS. Most of the students were inclined to believe this, and another bloody riot ensued.

As for me, I’d had it. Had it with April, had it with the revolution and had it with Paris. If I could have, I would have left for London immediately, but the cross-Channel ferries weren’t operating and Skyways had no vacancies for some days. What few tourists remained trapped in Paris were queuing for buses to Brussels, Amsterdam or Geneva, anywhere as long as they got out of France.

Mostly, I felt numb in the aftermath of killing Brad, though this was perhaps more to do with what he had told me about April than about the act itself, which had been an accident, and for which I didn’t blame myself.

April. How could she deceive me so? How could she be so cold, so cruel, so callous? I meant nothing to her, just the nearest man to scratch her itch.

A quickie. A joke.

I saw her only once more, near the Luxembourg Gardens, the same gardens we jumped into that marvellous night a million years ago, and as she made to come towards me I took off into a side street. I didn’t want to talk to her again, didn’t even want to see her. And it wasn’t only April. I stayed away from all of them: Henri, Alain, Brigitte, Nadine, the lot of them. To me they had all become inextricably linked with April’s humiliation of me, and I couldn’t bear to be with them.

One day Henri managed to get me aside and told me that April had committed suicide. He seemed angry rather than sad. I stared at him in disbelief. When he started to say something more, I cut him off and fled. I don’t think anyone knew that I had killed Brad, but clearly April lamented his loss so much that she no longer felt her life was worth living. He wasn’t worth it, I wanted to say, remembering the things he had told me under the bridge that night. If anyone was the killer, it was Brad not me. He had killed my love for April, and now he had killed April.

I refused to allow myself to feel anything for her.

The people at Skyways said I might have some luck if I came out to the airport and waited for a vacancy on standby, which I did. Before I left, I glanced around my room one last time and saw nothing I wanted to take with me, not even April’s silk scarf, which I had kept. So, in the clothes I was wearing, with the 500 francs that was all the Bank of France allowed to me withdraw, I left the country and never went back.

Until now.

I think it must be the memory of tear gas that makes my eyes water so. I wipe them with the back of my hand and the waiter comes to ask me if I am all right. I tell him I am and order another pichet. I have nowhere else to go except the grave; I might as well stay here and drink myself to death. What is the point of another miserable six months on earth anyway?

The girl who reminds me of April crushes out her cigarette and twists a strand of hair. Her lover is late. I dream of consoling her, but what have I to offer?

‘Professor Dodgson? Richard? Is that you?’

I look up slowly at the couple standing over me. The man is grey-haired, distinguished looking, and there is something about him… His wife, or companion, is rather stout with grey eyes and short salt and pepper hair. Both are well dressed, healthy looking, the epitome of the Parisian bourgeoisie.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage.’

‘Henri Boulanger,’ he says. ‘I was once your student. My wife, Brigitte, was also a student.’

‘Henri? Brigitte?’ I stand to shake his hand. ‘Is it really you?’

He smiles. ‘Yes. I wasn’t sure about you at first. You haven’t changed all that much in the face, the eyes, but you… perhaps you have lost weight?’

‘I’m ill, Henri. Dying, in fact. But please sit down. Be my guests. Let’s share some wine. Waiter.’

Henri looks at Brigitte, who nods, and they sit. She seems a little embarrassed, uncomfortable, though I can’t for the life of me imagine why. Perhaps it is because I told them I am dying. No doubt many people would feel uncomfortable sitting in a cafe drinking wine with death.

‘Funnily enough,’ I tell them, ‘I was just thinking about you. What are you doing here?’

Henri beams. ‘Now I’m the professor,’ he says with great pride. ‘I teach literature at the Sorbonne.’

‘Good for you, Henri. I always believed you’d go far.’

‘It’s a pity you couldn’t have stayed around.’

‘They were difficult times, Henri. Interesting, as the Chinese say.’

‘Still… It was a sad business about that girl. What was her name?’

‘April?’ I say, and I feel an echo of my old love as I say her name. Ap-reel.

‘April. Yes. That was around the time you went away.’

‘My time here was over,’ I tell him. ‘I had no job, the country was in a state of civil war. It wasn’t my future.’

Henri frowns. ‘Yes, I know. Nobody blames you for getting out… it’s not that…’

‘Blames me for what, Henri?’

He glances at Brigitte, who looks deep into her glass of wine. ‘You remember,’ he says. ‘The suicide? I told you about it.’

‘I remember. She killed herself over an American boy the CRS beat to death.’

‘Brad? But that wasn’t… I mean…’ He stares at me, wide-eyed. ‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Don’t know what?’

‘I tried to tell you at the time, but you turned away.’

‘Tell me what?’

Brigitte looks up slowly from her wine and speaks. ‘Why did you desert her? Why did you turn your back on her?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You rejected her. You broke her heart. The silly girl was in love with you, and you spurned her. That’s why she killed herself.’

‘That’s ridiculous. She killed herself because of the American.’

Brigitte shakes her head. ‘No. Believe me, it was you. She told me. She could talk only about you in the days before…’

‘But… Brad?’

‘Brad was jealous. Don’t you understand? She was never more than a casual girlfriend to him. He wanted more, but she fell for you.’

I shake my head slowly. I can’t believe this. Can’t allow myself to believe this. The world starts to become indistinct, all shadows and echoes. I can’t breathe. My skin tingles with pins and needles. I feel a touch on my shoulder.

‘Are you all right? Richard? Are you all right?’

It is Henri. I hear him call for a brandy and someone places a cool glass in my hand. I sip. It burns and seems to dispel the mist a little. Brigitte rests her hand on my arm and leans forward. ‘You mean you really didn’t know?’

I shake my head.

‘Henri tried to tell you.’

‘Brad,’ I whisper. ‘Brad told me she just used me, that she thought I was a joke. I believed him.’

Henri and Brigitte look at one another, then back at me, concern and pity in their eyes. A little more than that in Henri’s, too: suspicion. Maybe everybody wasn’t convinced that the CRS had killed Brad after all.

‘He was jealous,’ Brigitte repeats. ‘He lied.’

Suddenly, I start to laugh, which horrifies them. But I can’t help myself. People turn and look at us. Henri and Brigitte are embarrassed. When the laughter subsides, I am left feeling hollow. I sip more brandy. Henri has placed his cigarettes on the table. Gauloises, I notice.

‘May I?’ I ask, reaching for the packet, even though I haven’t smoked in twenty years.

He nods.

I light a Gauloise. Cough a little. What does it matter if I get lung cancer now? I’m already as good as dead. After a few puffs, the cigarette even starts to taste good, brings back, as tastes and smells do so well, even more memories of the cafes and nights of 1968. I begin to wonder whatever happened to that silk scarf I left in the drawer at my pension. I wish I could smell her jasmine scent again.

Outside, the girl’s lover arrives. He is young and handsome and he waves his arms as he apologizes for being late. She is sulky at first, but she brightens and kisses him. He runs his hand down her smooth, olive cheek and I can smell tear gas again.