You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [58]
He swiveled, searching, a smirk on his face, gauging the people surrounding him. The tall student stepped off the curb and walked toward the man with the bar who, when he saw him coming, swung it evenly, hitting him hard in the ribs. The student doubled over, holding his hand to his side.
Silver stepped into the street and yelled, “Arrête!”
The man with the bar looked at him, surprised. “Quoi? Qu’est-ce que tu vas faire?”
They stared at each other. For a moment no one moved. Then with two hands he pushed the bar against Silver’s chest, throwing him backward where he tripped and fell into the crowd. He took a step forward with the bar raised. Silver flinched, covering his head with his arms. The guy spit, tossed the bar to his friend, raised his fists and said, “Viens, tapette.” Silver, staring back blankly, his face red, camera hanging over his shoulder, never raised his fists.
“Viens.” He beckoned. “Pédé, va!” he said, and spit in Silver’s face.
Cheek wet, he didn’t move.
There was a strange silence, a radiating pressure. I remember thinking how odd it was that all of this was happening in the open that way, in dazzling daylight, all of us held down by fear.
The man turned to look at us again, and when he did the tall student came from behind and punched him hard in the side of the head.
And just before everything exploded, before the students rushed onto the street trying to protect their friend, bleeding on the asphalt, before the CRS came tearing through the crowd, dressed like storm troopers in full riot gear, before the short one who’d thrown the bottle grabbed the blond girl by the hair and threw her to the ground, I saw Silver wipe the spit from his cheek and disappear into the crowd.
Colin grabbed my arm and pulled me away. The CRS came from all sides swinging batons. There were skirmishes throughout and whatever sense of peace, whatever illusion of order there’d been an hour before, had turned now to frenzy.
Later a truck would arrive with water cannons to knock rioters off their feet. Metal tear gas canisters landed with hollow rattling clicks and the air filled with white.
It seemed to me it was the moment Silver turned away from us and disappeared that the Place de la République fell into chaos.
* * *
That evening I sat on a bench in the Square Laurent Prache not wanting to go home. I thought about Silver teaching “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
“Read this,” he said, “so as not to forget there’s a war coming.”
“‘Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots / Of gas-shells dropping softly behind,’” he read. “What’s interesting here? What surprises you?”
Hala knew immediately. “Softly,” she said. “He says, ‘softly.’”
“So, why is that interesting?”
“Softly. It’s like gentle, calm. It doesn’t fit. You have all of these horrible images—‘froth-corrupted lungs’ and ‘vile, incurable sores’ but then there’s this one word in the whole poem that’s, I don’t know, peaceful.”
He smiled at her and nodded. “So why does he do it?”
“The gas is a relief,” Colin said.
“How?”
“It saves them. They get to die, man. ‘Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots / But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;’ I mean who wants to live like that? Look, they’ve been marching with their dried-blood shoes, they’re totally broken, and they’ve got this stupid idea that they’re doing something honorable and here’s a way out, this canister.”
“Like an angel,” Lily said. “Landing softly to save them.”
“Good. Great, yes. Anything else?”
“The green?” Jane ventured.
“Go on.”
“‘The misty panes and thick green light, / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.’ All that, it’s, I don’t know, peaceful too. The green, the sea, the panes, it feels calm and slow and even the drowning seems, I don’t know, like a relief, like the speaker is almost envious of his escape.”
“What escape? Death?”
“Yeah,” Cara said, looking up from beneath her black hair. “Like he’s lucky to die. He doesn’t have