Free Metroland by Julian Barnes Page B

while?’
‘Yuh.’
‘When was that?’
I never actually lie, though for a time I used to try and discourage the obvious follow-ups. I would never mention May for a start. Early summer was the nearest I’d admit to.
‘Nineteen …’ (a frown of bad memory; mouth like a fish’s searching on the surface) ‘… must have been sixty-eight.’
Increasingly, though, the year has little effect, and I no longer feel it’s cheating to start blurring my dates. ‘Oh, late Sixties.’ ‘Sixty-seven, eight, round about then.’ For a few years, however, I used to have to dodge out of the way of a variety of replies.
‘Oh, what, when those awful …’ friends of my parents would begin, eyeing me palely and filling my pockets with cobblestones.
‘Did you see anything of …’ was the usual, mid-way response, as if we were running through films seen, or mutual friends.
And then there was a third type of follow-up, the cool one I felt most uneasy with.
‘Ah,’ (a shift in the chair, a tapping of the pipe, or some other settling social gesture) ‘les événements .’ It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been put as a question. But it would always be a statement; then there would be a respectful, rallying pause, disturbed only, say, by the creak of an unbroken leather jacket. If I failed to leap into the silence, therewould (with the kindly assumption that I was suffering from shellshock) be a helpful supplementary:
‘I knew a guy out there at the time …’ or
‘Now what I’ve always found unclear …’ or
‘Right on …’
The point is – well I was there, all through May, through the burning of the Bourse, the occupation of the Odéon, the Billancourt lock-in, the rumours of tanks roaring back through the night from Germany. But I didn’t actually see anything. I can’t, to be honest, remember even a smudge of smoke in the sky. Where did they put up all their posters? Not where I was living. Neither can I remember the newspaper headlines of the time; I suppose the papers went on as usual – I might have remembered if they’d stopped. Louis XVI (if you’ll forgive the comparison) went out hunting on the day the Bastille fell, came home and wrote in his diary that evening, ‘Rien ’. I came home and wrote for weeks on end, ‘Annick’. Not just that, of course: her name would be followed by paragraphs of hoarse delight, wry self-congratulation, and feigned moping; but was there any room in that panting, exultant journal for any ‘sharp vignettes of the struggle’, for any lumbering political reflections? I haven’t kept the diary, but I can’t believe there was.
Recently, Toni showed me a letter I’d written him from Paris, which contained a rare comment on the crisis. My explanation of the troubles, it seems, was that the students were too stupid to understand their courses, became mentally frustrated, and because of the lack of sports facilities had taken to fighting the riot police. ‘You may have seen a rather well-structured photograph’, I wrote, ‘of a group of police chasing a student into the river. The student is turning sideways towards the camera. A touch of Lartigue about it. At least he got some exercise. Mens seina in corpore seino .’
Toni still occasionally quotes me phrases from that letter when he thinks I’m getting complacent; which is most of the time. Apparently, the student involved was drowned – or at least that’s what some people said – though even if it were true,I wasn’t to know at the time, was I? Toni, naturally enough, is fairly scathing about my whole Parisian experience.
‘Absolutely fucking typical. Only time you’ve been in the right place at the right time in your whole life, I’d say, and where are you? Holed up in an attic stuffing some chippy. It almost makes me believe in cosmic order, it’s so appropriate. I suppose you were mending your bike during that skirmish of 14–18? Doing your eleven-plus during Suez?’ (Actually, yes, more or less)