The Last Days of New Paris

Thibaut prods the books with his toe as though they might turn into more expected spoils. She smacks his foot away. Maps of Paris. Journals: Minotaure; Documents; Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution; La Révolution surréaliste; View.

“Why do you have these?” he says. His voice is hushed.

The woman brushes the covers clean. “You thought I was a treasure-hunter. Jesus.” She looks at him through her camera’s viewfinder and he puts his hand in front of his face. She presses the button and it clicks and he feels something in his blood. He keeps staring at her journals, thinking of those he once carried. He left them, years ago, when he took his leave of training. An odd homage to his instructors, those spare copies, pages full of their own work.

The woman sighs with relief. “If you’d broken this, you and I would’ve been on a bad footing.”

She puts the camera strap around her neck and brushes dirt from a big leather notebook. She offers her hand.

“I’m not here to steal,” she says. “I’m here to keep a record.”

After he left his dead parents behind him, before he found those who would become his comrades, Thibaut, not yet sixteen, had hid and crept and wandered for a long time. When he reached the edge of the old city, he had secreted himself where he could see gangs of terrified, trapped citizens run, launch themselves at barricades thrown up at the perimeter of the blasted zone, from beyond which the Nazi guards fired remorseless fusillades, killing them until they understood there was no way to leave. In those first days some German soldiers, too, had run at their compatriots’ positions, waving and shouting to be let across the street and out. If they came too close, they, too, were put down. Those officers and men who saw and hung back, pleading, were commanded over loudspeakers to remain within the affected radius, to await instructions.

He retreated to the unsafety of Paris. There Thibaut slept where he could and hunted for food and wiped his eyes and hid from terrible things. He crept repeatedly back to those outskirts, though, tried to scout a way out, again and again, failed every time. The city was rigorously sealed.

At last one night under pounding rain, sheltering in the ruins of a tobacconist and leafing listlessly through his belongings, he found in his pack that last stack of pamphlets and books he had received, the day the blast had blasted. Thibaut cut the string that still bound it.

Géographie nocturne, a pamphlet of poems. A review; La Main à plume. The Surrealism of those still in the occupied city. Written in resistance, under occupation. He had seen the names Chabrun, Patin, Dotrement. The rain cracked the window onto nocturnal geography.

“ ‘Those who are asleep,’ ” Thibaut had read, “ ‘are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe.’ ”

He opened the second volume onto Chabrun’s “État de présence.” That defense of poetry, antifascist rage. The statement of intent of these stay-behind faithful, that, much later, Thibaut would recite to the Main à plume selectors, to pass his entry test. A Surrealist state of presence. He riffled the pages and the first words he read were almost the document’s last.

“Should we go? Stay? If you can stay, stay…”

Thibaut was shaking again and not from cold.

“We remain.”

Chapter Two. 1941

A man in a homburg hat emerged into the Place Felix Baret. He still wasn’t accustomed to the quality of the noise: petrol rationing kept more and more cars from the road, and in this modern town he could hear wagon wheels and horses’ hooves.

Port city, hot thug metropolis, exileville, clot of refugees, milked dry and beaten. 1941, and France for the French.

Varian Fry, thirty-four, thin, his mouth set, with his attention and his focus, looked like what he was: a man who knew something. He squinted at the line outside the office. He’d grown used to the terrible hope he saw in those crowds.

The alleys bustled and the bars were full enough. There were yells in many languages. The mountains still watched over everything and the late spring was warm. Streets away, the sea shifted. I should be sitting on the quay, Fry thought. I should be taking off my shoes and rolling up my trousers. Throwing stones into little waves to frustrate the fish. I should kick my shoes into the water.

He saw sellers of visas, information, lies. Marseille flushed.

A popular sign in a boulangerie said Entreprise Française, by a portrait of the lugubrious marshal. Fry took off his spectacles, as if to disallow himself a clear sight at such barbarism.

“Mess your! Mess your!”