Бруно Ясенский - I Burn Paris

It started with a minor, seemingly insignificant incident that was decidedly private in nature.

One beautiful November evening, on the corner of Rue Vivienne and Boulevard Montmartre, Jeanette informed Pierre that she would most definitely be requiring a pair of evening slippers.

They walked slowly, arm in arm, intermingling with that random and unsynchronized throng of extras cast by Europe’s rickety film projector onto the screen of Paris’s boulevards every evening.

Pierre was gloomy and withdrawn.

He had good reason.

That very morning the foreman, measuring the hall of the factory with guttapercha steps, had stopped suddenly before his machine and, his eyes fixed somewhere just above Pierre’s shoulder, told him to pack his tools.

This quiet angling had been going on for two weeks. Pierre had heard from his friends that France’s lousy economic condition had made people stop buying automobiles. Factories were being threatened with closure. The workforce was being cut by half everywhere you looked. To avoid any commotion, people were being dismissed a handful at a time and from different divisions, staggered throughout the day.

When you came to work in the morning and stood at your workstation, you couldn’t know for certain if you wouldn’t be the next to go.

Four hundred agitated pairs of eyes, like dogs snuffling the ground, surreptitiously followed every step of the foreman’s heavy feet as they moved slowly, deliberately, as it were, pacing between the workstations, and tried to avoid meeting his gaze as it slithered across all their faces. Hunched over their machines, as if yearning to become even smaller, grayer, more imperceptible, four hundred workers raveled the seconds on their smoking machines in a feverish race of fingers, tangled and hoarse from silently screaming, that seemed to mumble: “I’m the fastest! Don’t pick me! Not me!”

Day in, day out, in some corner of the hall, the cruel, sloped handwriting of steps would come to a full stop, and a flat, expressionless voice would break the tense silence: “Pack up your tools!”

Then a few hundred chests would give a sigh of relief like a blast from a ventilator: “So it’s not me! Not me!” Hastily, even more quickly, the trained fingers grabbed and grafted and wound second upon second, link upon link of the iron, eight-hour chain.

Pierre had gotten word: the politically suspect were the first to go. He had nothing to worry about. He kept his distance from agitators. He didn’t attend rallies. During the last strike he had broken the picket line. The tub-thumpers had scowled at him. When he saw the foreman he always tensed his lips into a friendly smile.

In spite of all that, whenever the foreman began his silent, malevolent stroll through the hall, Pierre’s fingers tangled in anxiety; the tools flew from his hands, and he would leave them where they fell, for fear of calling attention to himself. Beads of sweat moistened his feverish body like a cold compress.

But when the ominous steps stopped abruptly before his workstation that morning, when his gaze read the sentence from the sketch on the foreman’s lips, Pierre unexpectedly felt something like relief: So this was the end!

Taking his time, he leisurely packed his segregated tools into his bundle. He looked at no one else as he started to remove his overalls and carefully wrap them in paper.

When his food tokens were being counted out in the secretary’s office, it turned out that someone had stolen his micrometer.

The faultless mechanism of the factory administration transferred him to the office of the inspectorate. In the office, a bald, cross-eyed clerk laconically informed Pierre that the factory would be docking him forty francs for the lost micrometer. He had collected the remainder the day before yesterday as an advance. He would be getting nothing more.

Pierre gathered the symmetrically arranged, grease-splattered documents in silence. He knew all too well: The factory and the government were collaborating to deny laid-off workers their right to unemployment benefits by omitting the phrase “dismissed for redundancy” on the document. For a moment he still wanted to try, just to be sure. He glanced at the nasty, gleaming bald pate of the upright scribe, at the pair of thugs working for factory security, whose backs were turned as if they were occupied in conversation… He understood there was nothing to be done.

He trudged out the office.

At the gate, he was relieved of his pass, and the contents of his bundle were searched.

Finding himself on the street, Pierre stood for some time in helplessness, wondering where to go. A fat navy-blue policeman with the face of a bulldog, a polished ID on his collar, barked into his ear that loitering was not permitted.

He decided to go around to a few factories. But inevitably, wherever he applied, he was turned away empty-handed. The crisis was everywhere. The factories were only operating a few days a week. Jobs were being slashed. Hiring new workers was out of the question.

After running around all day, tired and hungry, he went to the warehouse at 7:00 to pick up Jeanette.

Jeannette thought she needed evening slippers. Jeannette was absolutely right. The following day was St. Catherine’s Day. The warehouse was organizing a staff ball. Being thrifty, she had turned last year’s dress into a new one. Now all she needed was the evening slippers. She couldn’t very well go to a ball in her patent-leather shoes! Anyway, they weren’t so expensive – she had seen some gorgeous brocade ones in a storefront for only fifty francs.

Pierre had exactly three sous in his pocket, and in gloomy silence he listened to the melodious chirping of his girlfriend, at whose sound something fluttered in his chest as if he were taking a hairpin turn on Devil’s Mountain.

The next day’s search proved just as fruitless. Nobody was hiring. At 7:00 p.m. a tired and dejected Pierre found himself somewhere on the outskirts, at the far end of Paris. He was supposed to be waiting for Jeannette to get off work. He was in no state to make it there in time. And what would he tell her? Jeannette needed evening slippers. She would cry. Pierre couldn’t stand the sight of her tears. He made his way to town with a sinking heart.

On the way he thought about Jeannette. He decided he had behaved badly by not going to wait for her to get off work. The thing to do was explain it to her, make her see the whole situation. But instead, he’d abandoned her like a louse. She must have waited for him. Then she had given up and gone home. She’d be right to hold a grudge. Despite the lateness of the hour, he felt he had to go see her, to explain everything and ask for her forgiveness.

At her apartment he found out that Jeannette still hadn’t returned from town. This information caught him off guard, a blow scattering the beads of sentences so painstakingly strung together in his mind.

Where could Jeannette have gone so late at night? She almost never went out alone in the evening. He decided to wait by her front gate. Soon his legs were sore. He sat on a rail, leaning against the wall. He waited.

Somewhere far off, in some invisible tower, a clock struck two. Slowly, like schoolboys who had learned their lessons by heart, the other towers repeated it from above the pulpits of the rooftops. Then silence again. His heavy eyelids fluttered clumsily like insects caught on flypaper, flapping upward for a moment, only to drop once more. Somewhere on the faraway bumpy pavement a first tentative cart began to rumble. Soon the garbage wagons would appear. The naked, coarse cobblestones – the bald, scalped skulls of the masses buried alive – would greet them with a long, clattering scream, passed from mouth to mouth as far as imaginable down the endless length of the street. Black men with long spears would run across the sidewalks, sinking their blades into the lanterns’ quivering hearts.