Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [46]
Clara, Boogie, Cedric, Leo, and I sat on the terrace of the Mabillon, drunkenly accumulating beer coasters on the day General Ridg-way, fresh out of the Korean War, drove into Paris, replacing Eisenhower at SHAPE. Only a thin, bored crowd of the curious had turned out to look over the general, yet the gendarmes were everywhere, and the boulevard Saint-Germain was black with Gardes Mobiles, their polished helmets catching the sun. All at once, the Place de l’Odéon was clotted with Communist demonstrators, men, women, and boys squirting out of the side streets, whipping out broomsticks from inside their shapeless jackets and hoisting anti-American posters on them. Clara began to moan. Her hands trembled.
“RIDGWAY,” the men hollered.
“À la porte,” the women responded in a piercing shriek.
Instantly the gendarmes penetrated the demonstration, fanning out, swinging those charming blue capes featured in just about every French tourist poster I’ve ever seen, capes that were actually weighted with lead pipe in the lining. Smashing noses. Cracking heads. The once-disciplined cry of Ridgway à la porte faltered, then broke. Demonstrators retreated, scattered, clutching their bleeding heads. And I ran off in pursuit of a fleeing Clara.
Another day a German general came to Paris, summoned by NATO, and French Jews and socialists paraded in sombre silence down the Champs-Élysées, wearing concentration-camp uniforms. Among them was Yossel Pinsky, the rue des Rosiers money-changer who would soon become my partner. “Misht zikh nisht arayn,” he said. Don’t mix in here. The Algerian troubles had begun. Gendarmes began to raid Left Bank hotels one by one, looking for Arabs without papers. Five o’clock one morning they pounded on our door and demanded to see passports. I produced mine, even as Clara, hitching the blankets to her chin, cowered in bed, whimpering. Her feet protruded, each toenail painted a different colour. A veritable rainbow. “Show them your passport, for Christ’s sake.”
“I can’t. I’m naked.”
“Tell me where it is.”
“No. You mustn’t.”
“Goddamn it, Clara.”
“Shit. Fuck.” Gathering her blanket round her as best she could, still whimpering, even as the gendarmes grinned at each other, she fished her passport out of the bottom of a suitcase, showed it to them, and locked the suitcase again.
“They saw my coozy, those filthy bastards. They were staring at it.”
I ran into Terry that afternoon at the Café Bonaparte, where I had gone to play the pinball-machine. My initial bond with Terry stemmed from the fact that we were both Montrealers. Me, off Jeanne Mance Street in the city’s old working-class Jewish quarter, and Terry out of the marginally better-off, WASPy Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood, where his father had scraped together a mean living out of a second-hand bookshop that specialized in Marxist texts. His mother had taught in an elementary school until parents protested they didn’t want their children watching documentaries about life on a communal farm in Ukraine, rather than Bugs Bunny cartoons.
If most of us were broke, Terry was destitute. Or so it seemed. There were days when his diet was limited to a baguette and a café au lait. He wore drip-dry shirts, which he rinsed in his hand basin and hung out to dry overnight. A girl he knew, who was lodged at the cité universitaire, used to cut his hair for him. Terry survived by writing six-hundred-word articles for UNESCO that were distributed free to newspapers round the world. For thirty-five dollars he would churn out an erudite piece commemorating the centennial of a famous writer’s birth, or the fiftieth anniversary of Marconi’s first wireless message across the Channel, or Major Walter Reed’s discovery that yellow fever was carried by mosquitoes. He was barely tolerated by our bunch, as I may have mentioned earlier, so if there was a party anywhere, the word that bounced from café to café was “For God’s sake, don’t tell Terry.” Terry,