The Last Days of New Paris

The Rex’s guards search them and incompetently question them and let them in to noise and warmth and the smell of drink, dirt, and sweat. Rows of seat-stubs slope down the tumbling hall. People are dancing. Women and men watch the huge screen from a raised half-floor above. What is showing is snips of images, monochrome light. Someone in the projection booth is stringing bits together, grabbing ripped-up centimeters of whatever film is by their fingers and running it for seconds, then replacing it. Melodramas, old silent movies, entertainments, news, documentary footage.

Surrealism comes for us all, Thibaut thinks.

He takes off his cap and tidies his ruined pajamas. No one looks at them: his true affiliation is dangerous here, but even the most austere Free French would not forbear deploying so powerful an artifact, Surrealist or not. Splendid figures sit in dark corners in pre-war clothes. A black woman plays chess urgently against herself. The dancers’ steps raise dust.

Tattered Free French uniforms, the grimy workers’ clothes of other partisans, with clues so Thibaut can judge that this person is Francs-Tireurs et Partisans or Groupe Manouchian, this one Confrérie Notre-Dame, this Armée Juive, that Ceux de la Libération. This thin intellectual from the Groupe du musée de l’Homme, perhaps; or a scout come in from the Société de Gévaudan, the legendary resistance center in a Lozère sanatorium. There might even be foolhardy rightists here, Vichy-loyal anti-Nazis. Vichysto-resistant, he thought them. An epithet from the future. But no Main à plume.

These streets will be bombed. Maybe trodden on by another angry sculpture, he supposes, or pulled toward Hell by fretful demons. Until then, at the end of the world, there’s drinking and dancing, moonshine and crude cocktails made from remnant liquor. Behind the bar are pinned scores of IOUs: no one is sure how money works any more. On the walls are posters, memories of resistance victories. The remnants of a swastika have been allowed to stand, so that they can be repeatedly defaced.

“Watch the screen,” says Sam.

“We should not be here,” Thibaut says.

“So we’ll be quick. We have to know. You got another projector we can use?”

She runs for the stairs. Thibaut watches the film over the heads of the dancers. After a minute it jerks and brightens. He imagines Sam shoving aside whoever is upstairs. Pistol to the head. Taking over from whoever feeds it bits and pieces of old film.

The screen goes dark then light.

Now it shows scattering airplanes, a long shot of dancing. A dim shape, in a vast chamber. Sunlight comes through a big window. There is a jump and Thibaut sees another corridor. He can barely make out the images through the distortion of burn. The inside of an empty room. Then with no transition the room contains a figure. A man in a coat watches eyelessly from a chessboard head.

In the Rex, the urgent jazz continues.

The figure on the screen might have been a man holding a board in front of his face, even has a hand to the board’s base, but there is something in his stillness. Thibaut knows he is looking at a manif.

There is no sound to the footage. A volley of bullets rips into the chessboard-man. Thibaut cries out.

The figure does not stagger but the front of his coat and jacket flower in blood. It drips from the board.

The music is breaking down now. People are staring at the screen. They see a soldier in Wehrmacht uniform, turned slowly away from the camera, in another sunbeam-crisscrossed chamber full of floating dust.

A figure in a white coat enters the shot and prods the soldier. Machinery moves. A crucifix is on the wall. The soldier keeps turning, and just as his features should become visible to the camera, with a smooth transition he is back to facing away again, and still turning, his face still hidden.

“That’s the Soldier with No Name!” a woman shouts in the quieting room. “I saw him once.” A faceless German officer in a dirty uniform, it walks the city flicking away coins on which are written slogans that turn the heads of German fighters. Currency stamped with sedition. The manif foments renegacy. Now, on the screen, it stands on a platform. It still faces away. You will never see its face. There is a noose around its neck.

A trapdoor opens and the soldier falls and snaps hideously to. The crowd cries out.

It sways. Even in death the manif’s face never turns toward the camera.

People are standing. On the screen now there is a priest, not Alesch. A glimmer of a darker chamber, for one instant a huge shape.

“That’s Drancy,” someone says.

A massive intricate thing is strapped down by many parts. At one end of a dissecting table, a sewing machine, at the other an umbrella. Between them, flickering in black and white, is an exquisite corpse. The third that Thibaut has ever seen. Its head is a great spider, twitching limbs above the body of a well-dressed man. Its legs are amphorae. The manif is snared with wires.