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.