My mother introduced me to Gérard and his family, who lived in the same building. The first time we met, Gérard volunteered to accompany me on a visit to any of the city’s landmarks I might care to see. I said I wanted to visit Notre Dame (it wasn’t that I was interested in church architecture, but I wanted to see the cathedral and its great bell, which the hunchback Quasimodo had rung in the novel by Hugo that I had loved, and that had made me cry). We agreed that he would take me there in two days’ time.
Gérard came by for me at ten in the morning; my mother had gone to work. We set off from the house toward Notre Dame. On the way to the Metro, and in the train, Gérard told me about the student demonstrations that had begun on 22 March in Nanterre. Eight students had stormed the dean’s office, to protest the arrest of six of their classmates for being active on a committee organised against the Vietnam War. It had been decided that these eight students would come before the disciplinary board a month later.
Gérard said, ‘On Friday the third of May, in the forecourt of the university, a group of student activists made a circle around the eight students who were to stand before the disciplinary board the following Monday. The crowd got bigger, and just kept growing. At four o’clock in the afternoon, riot police surrounded the university and began arresting students. As the news spread, even more students began showing up, and a battle ensued between them and the police. The closure of the university was announced — it’s only the second time in seven hundred years that the Sorbonne has been closed down; the first time was in 1940, when Paris was occupied by the Nazis.
‘Less than ten days after the decision to close the university, the President of the Republic was forced to make the decision to withdraw the police and reopen it. But things were not about to go back to the way they’d been before. The students took over the university. They opened up the gates, so that anyone who wanted to could join them in brainstorming and discussion sessions.
‘Between the closure and reopening of the university, lots of battles were waged, and workers’ strikes mounted and spread throughout France.’
‘Are you sure you want to go to Notre Dame?’
We changed direction.
Gérard took me to the Sorbonne University courtyard. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘with us standing in the courtyard, is where the demonstrations of Friday the third of May took place. From here, on Monday the sixth of May, the eight students marched, singing the National Anthem; they passed through the ring of policemen encircling the campus on their way to the disciplinary hearing. The demonstration heated up and spread into other parts of Paris. While the procession was making its way back into the Latin Quarter, the police attacked it. So the demonstrators began throwing stones they picked up from the street, overturning cars and erecting barricades. Heated clashes ensued, and these were repeated in the days that followed. It wasn’t only the students who were setting up barricades, but the residents of the neighbourhood as well; workers, housewives, and passersby all pitched in, supplying stones, planks of wood, rubbish bins, and iron bars. The battles raged all through the night, and house-raids went on all night, too. The police would raid a house and set upon the person they were after with their cudgels and beat him, then carry him out by force and throw him into one of their cars, then move on to the next address.’
We stood in front of the university buildings, which were tranquil now, but in my imagination, and in Gérard’s words, they were crowded with demonstrators and police, vivid with slogans and banners.
‘I’ll show you where traces of the battles can still be seen.’
We headed toward Rue Gay-Lussac.
Gérard went on at length, as we walked along the boulevard, and in the succeeding days, telling me about the battles that had taken place in this street on ‘Bloody Monday’. He would talk about the violence of the police, the students’ resistance, how many were wounded on both sides, and how many arrested. I would see with my own eyes some of the slogans scrawled on the walls: ‘Let our comrades go!’ ‘Down with the police state!’ ‘Down with capitalist society!’ ‘Long live the workers’ assemblies!’ Out of the dozens of slogans, there were three, written in heavy black marker on the walls of one of the buildings, that would bring me to a halt. One of them said: ‘Be realistic — demand the impossible!’ The second: ‘Let us form committees for dreams!’ The third: ‘When they test you, answer with questions!’ (Later I would write them on the walls of my room in Cairo, and beside them I would hang the two posters Gérard gave me.) Also in rue Gay-Lussac I could see the shredded remains of posters, or spread-open pages from the newspapers, impossible to read because of the plethora of comments appended to them in red, green, and blue ink, in the margins and between the lines; I also noted that parts of the street had been picked clean of stones.
Gérard continued his story, moving from Nanterre to Paris and from Paris to Nantes, then returning to Paris, and from there to the Renault factories at Billancourt. He told me, ‘The students said…’ ‘The workers said…’ ‘The students did this…’ ‘The workers did that…’ I paid close attention, but when the moment came for me to ask questions, I was so afraid of sounding stupid that I held back.
I didn’t notice that we had been walking for hours on end until Gérard said, ‘It’s four o’clock — aren’t you hungry? I’m really thirsty.’
We took a road that delivered us to a broad avenue called rue des Ecoles. (I liked the name, and years later, on subsequent visits to Paris, I would be intent on staying in one of the hotels on this street, because I liked the name and because the memory of that day had stayed with me, recalling that nice boy I liked so much, who had conducted me of his own accord to a realm of knowledge that would change many things in my life, at least for some years to come.)
In the rue des Ecoles, we sat in a café and ordered juice and sandwiches.
I went home to my mother flying high, full of stories and questions. I questioned her, and she filled me in on some of the details, telling me where she had been, what she had heard, and what she had done. (I was surprised to learn that she had taken part in the strike.) I asked her about all those points on which I had wanted to question Gérard, but refrained, for fear of appearing ignorant in his eyes: the locations of certain streets and squares, certain people, and letters I knew were initials standing for the names of organisations or guilds or societies, but I didn’t know what they meant or what they represented. I asked, she replied, and then she brought me a map of Paris and pointed out places. ‘This is the river,’ she said, ‘and here’s the Place de la République, where the main part of the demonstration started out, on Monday the thirteenth of May. And here, on the other side of the river, is the Latin Quarter. This is the Sorbonne’ — with her finger she pointed to the location of the university, to the west of the Latin Quarter. She moved her finger farther, then stopped and said, ‘Here at the southeastern edge is the Censier Centre, the new building of the University College of Humanities, where the pamphlets were prepared and printed. And this is rue des Ecoles, where you were.’
When I told her ‘good night’, she kissed me with a smile that seemed somehow odd to me, saying, ‘You’ve grown up, Nada, and — lo and behold — you’re interested in politics!’ She didn’t say ‘like your father’, but I now believe that the way she smiled had something to do with the words that would have completed her sentence. I finished the sentence for myself years afterward, when she told me that, not quite two decades before the summer of 1968, she had accompanied my father, recently arrived in the city, through the streets of Paris, in order to show him places connected with the soldiers of the German occupation and with the French resistance; and that, some weeks before our reunion, she herself had taken part in the momentous events of Paris.