Leaping between the rails of the barges, which had been shoved to the middle of the river with poles, the crew hastily tied them with lines and fastened them to the tugboat. The crowd squeezed onto the riverbank to observe their work in silence.
Comrade Laval picked up the receiver one last time:
“Hello! Who’s speaking! A postal worker? Splendid. Please inform the mayor that before the lines are repaired tomorrow, the junction telephone pole should be burnt and a new one put in its place, just to be safe. Yes, that’s all I wanted to say. Please send the residents of Tansorel a proletarian greeting from revolutionary Paris.”
Comrade Laval put the phone to one side.
“All hands on deck! Line up! Are there fifteen of you? Good. Positions. Cut the wires! Take down the floodlights! Turn off all lights! We’re on our way!”
The boat shuddered, wobbled on the spot, and heavily shunted forward, nosing its way like a massive camel with its three barge humps.
“Full steam ahead!”
Comrade Laval paced the deck. In the darkness he bumped into a figure leaning on the railing.
“Is that you, Comrade Monsignac? What do you think, will we make it to Paris before dawn?”
“Hard to imagine, with all this cargo…,” the sailor gloomily replied.
“But on the other hand, now we’re sailing with the current, so it’s easier.”
The sailor turned away without another word and pointed at the bursting seam of the horizon. “Day is breaking,” he said dryly. “It’ll be totally bright before we get there.”
Comrade Laval spent a long time uneasily staring at the flesh-colored gash growing before his very eyes.
“We’re late…,” he whispered, sunk in thought.
On either side the gray riverbanks were already sketching themselves out clearly, now sown with the first glimmers of light.
Comrade Laval did not know that a small, hunchbacked man had left Tansorel on bicycle an hour before, taking the field paths toward town.
The small man arrived at the town when the gray thaw in the heavens had already spread wide.
Ten minutes later rubber words were bouncing like a ball, chasing the breathless tugboat. Hopping from wire to wire, the words overtook the tugboat and bounced onward, into forests of red blinking lights.
After another twenty minutes the following dialogue occurred in a plush, smoky salon of an old palace – the headquarters of the cordon army:
Lieutenant: Should we fire on the tugboat?
Captain: Of course, I’ve already given the orders.
Lieutenant: But… as long as they’ve already made it… and, as the telegram says, they didn’t touch shore at all and observed all precautions… What harm would it do to let them bring food to the city? They present no danger for now, and by sinking them we would achieve nothing.
Captain: Have you gone mad, Monteloup? Let them arrive at the city unpunished? So that someone else breaks through tomorrow? What have we set up this cordon for, then? Their impertinence must not go unpunished. And perhaps you’ve forgotten that these are Bolsheviks, and that they are bringing food to their commune? Should we be allowing more supplies for their commune? Thank you very much indeed!
Lieutenant: Of course not… I simply… I thought… since they’ve already made it…
A crowd of curious onlookers started gathering around Paris’s Pont de Bercy at three a.m., anxiously peering eastward, where the white gash of daybreak was shining through the parted lips of sky and earth.
At five o’clock the gash filled half the sky. The return of the expedition seemed more and more unlikely. The dejected crowd started slowly drifting homeward. Just then, the thunder of the first cannon shot was heard from the east. The crowd shuddered, swayed, and then jerked in that direction as one body.
“They’re coming!” came a holler.
The cannons boomed one after another. The crowd poured along the riverbank in a churning wave. A woman, perched like a bird on the iron railing of the bridge, wailed at the top of her lungs. After ten minutes of cannon fire, the murmur had changed into a howl.
Suddenly, someone roared:
“They’re coming!”
A silence fell.
A black tugboat with a shattered funnel and bits of deck boards dangling helplessly had appeared at the bend in the river. The tugboat was panting heavily and floating practically on its side, pulling two barges with the remains of its strength. In place of the third barge, a black sideboard listlessly flapped its fins of broken planks.
The tugboat slowly approached the bridge. The crowd’s enthusiasm peaked:
“Laval! Long live Laval!”
The tugboat struggled to shore. A squat, blood-smeared sailor leapt off and onto the sand.
“Laval! Where is Laval!” the crowd roared.
The sailor pointed a bandaged hand to the deck.
A few Red Guard soldiers jumped on board. The crowd grew mute in expectation. A few minutes later two soldiers appeared on deck, carrying something on a trench coat used as a makeshift stretcher.
The crowd craned forward.
On the coat lay a man with eyes squeezed shut and head thrown back. There was a mess of bloody chopped meat where his legs should have been.
The crowd removed their hats and stepped back in silence.
The Red Guards carried Comrade Laval through this improvised passage to the corner pharmacy.
Then the turmoil began.
Four men in blue army trench coats paced between the hospital beds. The orderly in front stopped before one of them.
“Here he is, Comrade Commandant.”
Comrade Lecoq bent down over the cot.
A shadow fell over the wounded man’s eyelids; they quivered and fluttered like a flame about to die, while the great, glassy eyes opened and rested upon the face of Comrade Lecoq. Finding a familiar face, the filmy eyes lit up in a smile. The lips moved mechanically, flapped like wings, struggling to release some cumbersome words from the cocoon of the mouth:
“Is that you, Comrade Commandant?… You see? I brought… They only sunk one of my barges, the bastards…,” he spluttered, his lips already going blue.
Comrade Lecoq bent down over him and, without speaking, gave his lips a quiet brotherly kiss.
Comrade Lecoq did not tell the man, dying with a smile of contentment, that the four hundred sacks he had brought back were filled with sand, not flour…
Three days later, the starved population of the commune stormed the barricades of the Anglo-American territory. The terrified gentlemen mobilized the army of the French burghers still inhabiting their territory to come to their defense. The fight at the barricades lasted several days and was marked by uncommon resistance and cruelty. Among the casualties were Comrade Lecoq – who was not to finish his history of the Paris plague – and many other outstanding leaders of the commune.
The new commander-in-chief of the dwindling army of the Belleville Soviet Republic decided to force the barricade with heavy artillery, positioning their battery on Red Hill. When called upon to surrender, the Anglo-American territory refused.
Who can say what new and terrifying scenes, what fantastic battles our multilingual, war-torn Paris would have witnessed, had the merciful plague not outpaced its competitor – famine.
By the day of September 1, there was not one living soul in all the territories of over a dozen tiny states signified on the map by the single, solitary circle of Paris.
The plague, having consumed the last Parisian, left the city that very same day, just as suddenly as it had appeared.
Part 3