The Last Days of New Paris

I miss nothing, Thibaut insists to himself once more. Not the pre-war days, nor the recent relative safety of the ninth arrondissement. The stranded Nazis in the tenth could never take those streets, or the altered landscapes they crisscrossed, the sagelands, smoothed alpine topographies like sagging drapes, houses of frozen rooms full of clocks, places where the geography echoed itself. The ninth was too completely made of recalcitrant art for anyone to take. It would shelter no one but the partisans of that art — the Surrealist stay-behinds, soldiers of the unconscious. Main à plume.

I don’t miss a thing. Thibaut clenches his fist on his weapon.

Each riverbank tree here is in a different season. Dead leaves and live. Thibaut wants railway lines. Routes out. Under one lamppost, it is night. He leans against it and sits and for long minutes looks up at stars.

Do I even deserve these places any more? They came at the wrong time and they came in the wrong way. Liberation was fucked up. But if Thibaut can find no spark of joy in them, he thinks, maybe he is no better than one of Stalin’s men. Or a drone for de Gaulle, an enemy of true freedom.

That isn’t me, he thinks. No.

He stands and steps back into the sunlight beyond the tiny manif nightlet, and as he does a howl fills the street.

Instantly Thibaut drops, takes cover behind the stub of a pillar, weapon raised. War has taught him how to be very still. That is not a human noise — nor, he is sure, that of a manif.

He waits. He controls his breathing and listens to a heavy approach. Something comes slowly into view. Thibaut sights down his rifle and tightens his grip.

A swaying body like a great bull’s. Its flanks are bloodied, and rainbowed as if with petrol on water. On its brow the thing has many long, gray, random horns, some broken. It bellows again and shows meat-eater tusks.

It does not move with the dreamlike specificity of a manif but with a thudding, broken step that he can feel through the ground. It comes with nothing of that stir of recognition — even at something inconceivable that he has never previously seen — that a manif brings him. It oozes and drips and raises nausea in Thibaut. Its blood crackles and smokes and hits the pavement in spots of flame. The beast shakes its head and flecks fly from its horns to land wetly. Thibaut’s innards spasm, and he knows from that clench that those are gobbets of manif.

If the devils and the living art cannot avoid each other, they will fight, terribly. The artflesh dripping from the demon’s face is fresh.

In the days after the S-Blast, the German forces and the newcomer manifs had been joined, appallingly, by such as this misplaced invader, battalions from below.

The exigencies of survival sent some of Thibaut’s comrades trying to make sense of these fallen, now risen, embarrassments. They accumulated expertise from bad books they hunted and found. They cajoled information from captured German summoners and specialist priests in Alesch’s nascent bishopric. The intrepid eavesdropped on snips of the demons’ bayed discussions, they pieced together information, parsed rumors of ill-tempered pacts between Hell and the Reich. Élise might have been able to tell him what kind of fiend it is he looks at, as he prays, if to no God, that it will not look at him: all Thibaut knows is that it is a devil, and a big one.

Like most of its kind the thing is obviously in pain. But that size, whatever its injuries or sickness, they will not help him. The few trinkets he has in his pack for use against the infernal are inadequate: it will kill him if it finds him.

But the beast shambles painfully away on what seems a varying number of legs and does not look in his direction. It leaves a trail of burning blood and broken ground.

He waits until it turns off the street, out of sight, and he listens to it haul itself away, and he waits longer until he can hear nothing. Only then does Thibaut slump at last, fingering his nightskirt. Even that, he thinks, tracing the edge of its hem, would not have saved him. I should get off the streets, he thinks. Then: Maybe I should take the Métro, he taunts himself.

Thibaut considers his dead, in the forest. He considers the ruined plan, the assault from which he exiled himself.

From his bag he pulls out a pencil and a stained old schoolbook, folded many times. He opens his war notebooks.

I’m not a fucking deserter. The mission is vacant. I’m not a deserter.

Thibaut was nearly seventeen when, following survivors’ stories and the noise of shots and burnt and uncannily twisted remains of German patrols and the intuitions that sometimes beset him, he tracked down the Main à plume in the ruins.