A Small Death in the Rue De Rennes

Peter was taking his plant for a walk. This morning the sun was out, for a change, and he had no classes. He carried it, swaying, in its pot down the flight of steps, his private companionway, that led from the Rue Monsieur le Prince to the Rue Antoine Dubois--a mews populated by cats where Brigitte Bardot had lived in La Vérité. He was a past master of short cuts as well as circuitous ways; though he had not yet traveled by sewer, he liked to pretend that some implacable Javert was trailing him. He came out onto the Boulevard St. Germain, greeted the statue of Danton and stopped to look in the windows of the bookshops selling medical textbooks, colored anatomical charts and dangling cardboard skeletons.

This uninviting merchandise exercised a gruesome attraction on Peter, who, if he could believe his family, was a known hypochondriac. The quarter where he had elected to live was dominated by the dark carcass of the old Ecole de Médecine, around which, like suckers, had sprung up a commerce in surgical equipment, wheelchairs, orthopedic pulleys, sputum basins, artificial limbs, as well as these bookstores containing yellowing treatises on every disease he could imagine himself catching, including le grand mal. The main School of Medicine had moved to a modern building on the Rue Jacob, which was why he seldom saw students around here--only an occasional browser leafing through dusty textbooks; it was as if his whole neighborhood had been put up in formaldehyde, like gallstones or those crusty corns and giant bunions he sometimes studied in the half-curtained window of a corncutter over near the Carréfour du Bac.

At the traffic light, he decided to turn up the Rue de Seine and continue on into the Rue de Tournon, his favorite street, and walk on the sunny side; there were too many hurrying pedestrians on the Boulevard St. Germain, making it hard for him to clear a path for the tall plant with its crowning glory of pale new leaves unfurling like little umbrellas. It was a member of the ivy family, as you could tell from its name--Fatshedera--although, unlike the English clan, it did not creep or clamber but stood upright. He had bought it at Les Halles on a Friday afternoon; at five o'clock, the public was let into the weekly potted-plant market, after the florists had made their selections. It pleased him that in Paris there was a "day" for every kind of thing, as in the first chapter of Genesis: Friday at Les Halles for potted plants and Tuesday for cut flowers; Sunday morning, on the Quai aux Fleurs, for birds; there was even a dog market somewhere on Wednesday. The Parisian apportionment of the week made him think of Italy, where articles of consumption were grouped, amusingly, into families resembling riddles, as, for example, the family that included salt, matches, stamps and tobacco (bought at the tabacchaio) or the chicken family that included eggs, rabbits and mushrooms; his father liked to remember a store in Rome that carried pork in the winter and straw hats in the summer.

The plantseller had warned Peter that the Fatshedera did not like too much light--which should have made it an ideal tenant for his apartment. But after a month's residence there, looking out on the air shaft, it had grown long, leggy and despondent, like its master. Its growth was all tending upward, to the crown, like that of trees in the jungle. The leaves at the base were falling off, one by one, and though Peter had been carefully irritating the stem at the base to promote new sideward growth, it had been ignoring this prodding on his part and just kept getting taller, weedlike, till he had finally had this idea of taking it for walks, once or twice a week, depending on the weather. It did not seem to mind drafts, and the outdoor temperature on a sunny day in late November was not appreciably colder than the indoor temperature chez him. He thought he was beginning to note signs of gratitude in the invalid for the trouble he was taking; a little bump near the base where he had been poking it with his knife seemed about to produce a stalk or pedicel, and there was a detectable return of chlorophyll, like a green flush to the cheeks of the shut-in. He spoke to it persuasively--sometimes out loud--urging it to grow. So far, he had resisted giving it a shot of fertilizer, because a mildewed American manual he had acquired on the quais--How to Care for Your House Plants--cautioned against giving fertilizer except to "healthy subjects." That would be like giving a gourmet dinner to a starving person--the old parable of the talents.

How to Care for Your House Plants was full of housewifely pointers that appealed to his frugality, like the column he used to enjoy in the Rocky Port weekly Sentinel where readers exchanged recipes for removing berry stains from clothing and keeping squirrels out of the bird-feeding tray. He wondered what dull adventures it had had before coming to lodge on his bookshelf: Had it traveled from Montclair to Stuttgart to Châteauroux in the trunk of some Army wife, along with the Joy of Cooking, "Getting the Most Out of Your Waring Blendor," "How to Use Your Singer" and instructions, with diagram, for carving the Thanksgiving turkey? Obedient to its recommendations, he had started some dish gardens in his Stygian lair from dried lentils, slices of carrots and grapefruit pips, setting them out in saucers under his student lamp, equipped with a 75-watt bulb--his landlady had confiscated the 150-watt bulb he had put in originally. Every day, he moved the positions of the saucers, so that they would share the light equally, determined not to show partiality in the vegetable kingdom, though already he preferred the lacy carrot. These dish gardens reminded him of the primary grades: the avocado and grapefruit plants on the broad window sill the class used to water, the acorns he used to hoard and the interesting fear (which his mother had finally scouted) that a cherry stone he had swallowed would turn into a tree branching out of his mouth.

All children, he guessed, were natural misers and sorcerers; the progeny of his new friends, the Bonfantes, were impressed and delighted by his dish gardens when he invited them to tea in his apartment. He promised to start them some in their kitchen window from bits of carrots and the eyes of potatoes, and he entrusted them with a sprouting garlic clove, with instructions to keep it in their clothes closet and gradually bring it out to the light; in the spring, it would have little white bell-like flowers--he did not see why garlic, though not specifically mentioned in How to Care, etc., should not act like any other bulb. They wanted to know whether this was American, like the jack-o'-lantern he had made them at Halloween, and Peter said it was. He was the first live American boy Irène and Gianni had ever seen, and they asked him many questions, such as: Was it true that Americans ate with their feet on the table? Their conception of America was a blend of wild West and asphalt jungle, and they listened with doubtful wonder to the stories Peter told of white wooden houses, ponds and waterfalls, skating, clamming, icecream freezers, blueberries, corn on the cob--one of his mother's rules for telling stories to children, which she had learned as a child from her father, was always to put in something good to eat.

His mother might say he had no business trying to keep a plant in his apartment. Certainly, the Fatshedera would have been happier in nature, wherever it basically came from--the Far East, he supposed. But he could not set it free, for it would die if he abandoned it. He was responsible for it, though no Plant Welfare League would intervene if he were to neglect it. Besides, it was making a minuscule contribution to the air of Paris. He had read an article in Le Figaro on air pollution (some doctor had taken a rat from the laboratory and exposed it at the Opera House; it was dead in 25 minutes), which said that Parisians could help by growing plants on their balconies and window ledges; the chlorophyll they exhaled was an air cleanser. Whenever Peter took his tall Fatshedera walking, he felt there was an exchange of benefits; in return for the light it received, it purified the atmosphere like a filter. He did not mind the centaurish figure he cut--half man, half vegetable--as he strolled along, the plant overtopping his head; often when he performed an action, he noticed, he lost his fear of visibility; it was as though he disappeared into the gest.

He examined a printer's window on the Rue de Tournon. Printing, as a trade, attracted him; bookbinding, too--there was a bookbinder he liked to watch at work on the Rue de Condé. He had been thinking a lot lately about what he would do with himself when he was through with college and the Army. He was sure he did not want to become an academic, though that was where his language major was leading him--straight into teaching, unless he took the State Department exams for the Foreign Service. He would have liked to have been a consul in Persia a hundred years ago, studying the native flora and fauna and Oriental religions and writing long reports home on the shah's court intrigues, but he could not see himself in a modern office building issuing visas, promoting U. S. foreign policy and the interests of Standard Oil and rotating back in two years to Washington for reassignment--in the old days, you were consul for 20 years or for life. His ideal career choice would be an occupation that kept him outdoors, like archaeologist or forester or explorer; yet everything in his background was pushing him to be some sort of scribe, if not a pharisee. His father said these were daydreams and not vocational drives: If Peter were serious about wanting to spend his life in the open air, he would have enrolled in a school of forestry or worked as a logger one summer or dug up Etruscan remains.... The babbo, Peter had to admit, was a shrewder prophet than his mother, who fondly saw him in a tropical helmet or excavating the skeleton of some Mycenaean warrior when she did not see him arguing before the Supreme Court.

In Paris, Peter had been dreaming of becoming a binder or a printer, though these trades not only kept you indoors but were probably worse for your health than teaching in a classroom, where at least you were on your feet all day in front of a blackboard. He would have enjoyed operating a clandestine press in the maquis and showering the country with broadsides and leaflets, but there was no Resistance anymore, except in uncongenial places like the Vietnamese mangrove swamps; and in the U. S., you could not become a printer unless you had an uncle or a father who belonged to the printers' union.

He turned right into the Rue de Vaugirard, passed the Senate and decided against going into the Luxembourg Garden today. Instead, he headed toward the Rue de Rennes, where there was a café frequented by some Swedish girls who went to the Alliance Française. As he approached, he heard strange noises--the sound of rhythmic chanting, mixed with honking--coming from the Rue de Rennes. He hurried on. At the corner, he saw what he took at first to be a parade and he wondered whether today could be a national holiday that he had failed to hear about. All along the wide street, householders were lined up on their balconies, some with brooms and dusters, watching a procession of young people marching abreast and chanting; they were carrying broad streamers and placards with slogans written on them that he could not make out. The traffic on the street had stopped; buses and cars were blowing their horns. Simultaneously with Peter's arrival, a police car appeared at the intersection and some gendarmes descended in a body, wearing dark-blue capes that swirled as they moved, giving the scene a festive look. Peter realized that he was witnessing a demonstration, such as he had read about in history.

More gendarmes were running up the Rue de Rennes, rounding the corner by the municipal pawnshop and blowing (continued on page 112)A Small Death(continued from page 70) their whistles. Ahead of them came a second wave of marchers, shouting and singing. Moving to the curb, Peter made out what was written on one of the billowing streamers. He felt slightly let down. It was only a student demonstration for better housing at the Cité Universitaire. The police were trying to break it up. He could hear them growling at the demonstrators, who laughed and jeered back. Behind Peter, in the glass-enclosed terrace of the corner café, people were standing on chairs to get a better view. At the far end of the street, near the Montparnasse station, he could see still more police alighting from a Black Maria and he grasped the strategy: They were trying to hem the students in.

The crowd on the sidewalk was augmenting; those behind were beginning to shove. A very tall blond boy in a turtleneck sweater and tight gray thin jacket edged in next to him on the curb; Peter was starting to be concerned for the safety of his plant. "C'est beau, hein?" said the boy, surveying the spectacle. The police had moved in on the marchers, in salients, swinging their capes. Mentally, Peter compared this airy ballet with the behavior of the police at home, hitting out with night sticks; for the first time, he approved thoroughly of the French. They had made an art of it, he decided, as he watched a line of students break and scatter as the harmless capes descended. In these fall maneuvers between youth and authority, the forces were evenly matched, the students having the advantage of numbers and the police, like matadors, that of dexterity. If he had had two free hands, he would have applauded. He slightly lowered his plant, so as not to obstruct the view for those in his rear.

As he did so, he heard a discordant sound of disapproval or derision, like the American raspberry; a policeman on the pavement whirled around and stared at Peter and his neighbor, whose face wore a sleepy, ironical smile, like that of a large pale cat. In a moment, the sound was repeated, and again the policeman whirled; the tall boy's drooping eyelid winked enigmatically at Peter--he was a strange-looking person, with high cheekbones, a snub nose and colorless beetling eyebrows that seemed to express perplexity. Peter, who liked to play the game of guessing nationalities, decided that he could not be French. A Russian, maybe, whose father worked at the embassy? Then the boy spoke, in a slow, plaintive voice. "Jan Makowski. University of Chicago. Student of Oriental languages. Pleased to meet you." He had a strong demotic Middle Western accent.

Peter introduced himself. "I thought you were Russian," he said.

Makowski stuck out his lower lip, as though considering the accusation. "I'm of Polish origin," he said stiffly. "Born in Warsaw. My old man 'chose freedom' when I was a kid. I went to grammar school for a while here, but he couldn't make it in France; we just about starved. Now he teaches political science at Chicago. Full professor."

"Same here!" cried Peter. "I mean, my father's a professor and he used to be a refugee." Makowski did not appear to find this an especially striking coincidence. "This is great, isn't it?" Peter continued, looking around him. "Compared with those Cossacks back home, I mean. This is more like a game. Everybody here is having a ball."

"You think so?" Peter followed the other's frowning, derisory gaze. The line of students with the streamer had reformed. The flics charged them, striking right and left with their capes. A line of blood appeared on the cheek of one of the students; a second student fell to the ground. Peter could see no sign of a weapon and he looked at his neighbor, who stood with folded arms, for enlightenment. The police struck again. Then Peter understood. There was lead in those pretty blue capes; he had read about that somewhere, he now recalled, disgusted at his own simplicity. The students were counterattacking, ducking the flailing capes. He could distinguish three principal battle points in the confusion. Makowski nudged him. They watched a boy aim a kick at a cop's balls; the cop caught his foot and swung him around by the leg, then let him drop. There was blood on the street. Behind Peter, a woman was calling shame on the police. A flowerpot came hurtling down from a high balcony--possibly by accident. Two policemen rushed into the building. Peter's hand tightened on his own clay pot; he selected a target--a tall red-haired gendarme who would make an easy mark. Then wiser counsel--if that was what it was--prevailed; his grip relaxed and he started to get the shakes. His hands were sweaty. He might have killed a man a few seconds ago--the cop or even a student. "Peter Levi, murderer." The thought was strange to him and not unimpressive, though scary. He glanced curiously at Makowski, judicious, with curled lower lip, by his side, a simple, scowling spectator. Nobody but Peter himself seemed to be particularly involved with what was going on. Clerks in their bright-blue blouses de travail had left their counters and lined up on the sidewalk to watch; concierges, with their mutts, were standing in their doorways; shopkeepers, concerned for their property, were pulling down their iron blinds.

The students broke and began to run, pursued by the police. A youth was passed, headlong, from cop to cop, and deposited in a new Black Maria that had pulled up on the corner, just beyond a flower cart, at the Métro entrance. The police were working fast. "Nazi!" yelled someone behind Peter at a flic who was tripping a student. Two flics pushed past Peter and seized the offender, a young kid of about 16. When he resisted, they slugged him. "Nazi!" "Nazi!" Peter turned his head, but he could not locate where the voice or voices in a funny falsetto were coming from. People were looking in his direction; he asked himself whether his plant could be acting as an aerial.

Then he noticed that Makowski was slightly moving his lips. A ventriloquist! He wondered whether the Pole was crazy, playing a trick like that in a crowd, when he could get innocent bystanders arrested. "Cut it out," he muttered.

Now the demonstrators were darting through the throng, wherever they could find an opening, dropping their streamers and placards as they fled into the side streets, into the Métro, into the Magasins Réunis up the block. And instead of just letting them go, the police were hunting them down, aided by embattled concierges and their shrilly barking dogs. They were piling everybody they could catch into the Black Marias. Hungry for prey, they began to grab foreign students coming out of the Alliance Française, youths coming up from the Métro and blinking with surprise in the sunlight. As far as Peter could tell, their idea was to arrest anything that moved in the area between the ages of 16 and 25. He supposed that he and Makowski owed their immunity to the fact that they were stationary.

What shocked him, as an American, was that the demonstrators, once captured, showed no signs of civic resentment. They did not go limp, like civil rights workers, but hopped into the paddy wagons without further protest; it was as if they had been tagged in a game of prisoner's base. In the paddy wagon on the corner, the majority were laughing and clowning; two were playing cards; one, with a bloody kerchief tied around his head, was reading a book. Only the Nordic types from the Alliance Française were giving their captors an argument, which appeared to amuse the French kids, as though being a foreigner and falsely arrested were funny.

Detestation for all and sundry was making Peter nauseated. The rights of man were being violated, in the most elementary way, in broad daylight, before the eyes of literally hundreds of citizens, and nobody was raising a finger to help. At home, if this had happened around Columbia, say, there would be dozens of volunteer witnesses telling the cops to lay off, threatening to call up the mayor or their Congressman or the Civil Liberties Union; at home, citizens (continued on page 184)A Small Death(continued from page 112) were aware that there was such a thing as the Constitution. It came to Peter that he and Makowski, having watched the whole disgusting business from the side lines, could do something about it. They could write a letter to Le Monde, as témoins oculaires, and if Le Monde would not publish it, they could take it to the Herald Tribune. Or they could go to court and testify in the students' defense, assuming there was a trial or some sort of hearing: he was ready to swear that the demonstration had been completely peaceful until the police had used violence to break it up and he could swear, too, that several of the kids now in custody had not been among the marchers--the police had just arbitrarily seized them and roughed them up when they resisted. His heart thumping with excitement, he carefully memorized the features of two of the most vicious cops, so as to be able to make a positive identification. At the same time, his shyness made him hesitant of approaching the group in the Black Maria, to promise his support, as though a wall of glass separated him on the sidewalk from them, a few feet away, as though he would be intruding. A weird kind of politeness was gluing him to the spot. He put the question to Makowski. "Maybe we should give these guys our names and addresses."

But Makowski did not agree. He thought it was a lot of shit that he and Peter had a duty to offer themselves as witnesses. "Of course, the flics are sadists. C'est leur métier. The French take that for granted. You can't squeal about 'police brutality' in a court here. Everybody would think you were a fink." His voice took on a note of whining, offended logic, as though Peter's proposal caused him physical pain. "Besides, you're a'guest of France.' Remember? You don't interfere in a family quarrel unless you want your head busted. These French kids would spit on us if we stuck our noses in. They know how the system works: If they behave themselves and keep their mouths shut, chances are the cops will hold them a few hours and then let them go. It's entendu that they don't start yelling for a lawyer or claiming that the cops have hurt them." Naturally, foreign students got a different treatment. "Those dumb Swedes and Germans in the panier à salade don't dig it, but they're about to be deported."

"Deported?" Peter gulped. Of course, said Makowski; it happened all the time. The foreigners in the lettuce basket were just unlucky. If you were a foreigner and got picked up in one of these bagarres, you were automatically thrown out of the country.

Peter was incredulous. "Thrown out of the country?" he scoffed. "Without a hearing or anything? But these guys from the Alliance Française have an alibi. They can prove they were in class when the march was going on. You're nuts!"

But Makowski only laughed. He indicated two blond bespectacled giants whose heavy boots and white wool socks were protruding from the Black Maria. "Twenty-four hours to leave the country!"

"Just like that?" cried Peter, who was starting to be convinced. A craven fear for his own tenure on the Rue Monsieur le Prince entered his bones; in his mind, he slowly tore up the letter he had been writing to Le Monde and consigned it to the ash can of history.

"Just like that," said Makowski. "They relieve you of your passport and you get it back at the airport. I tell you, it happens all the time. That's why I kept my cool just now. It gives me kicks to bait the police, but France has other things to offer me and I want to stay a while longer. You know?"

Peter supposed he meant women. Feebly, he continued to argue, unwilling to submit to the dictatorship of Makowski's view of things, which. Peter clearly saw, would deprive him of his freedom of action: If you want to be your own master, his father used to say, always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it. Then he thought of his Norwegian friend, Dag. "I couldn't figure out what had become of him. We had a date to watch the election on TV and he never turned up. His landlady claimed he'd gone back to Norway. Finally, I heard a rumor he'd been deported. He was great on attending rallies at the Mutualité. I guess that's what got him. Poor guy."

Makowski was unsympathetic. He knew Dag's type--a law-abiding Scandinavian. They made the big mistake of always carrying their passport and their carte de séjour. Involuntarily, Peter's hand flew to his jacket pocket to make sure his were still there. "Mistake?"

"That only makes it easier for the police to deport you," Makowski pointed out. He had a whole theory based on his discovery that the French were a lazy people. "If a flic asks me for my passport and I hand it over, I simplify his job. He passes it on to his boss and they rubber-stamp me out of the country like a piece of second-class mail. But if I tell them my passport's at home, they have to figure out what to do next. Send me to get it and trust me to come back? They're not that dumb. Or send an agent with me to where I live, which is probably six flights up in some crummy mansarde? Nine times out of ten, they'll weigh the headaches involved against the relative ease of just letting me go, with a warning to watch it in the future. And in the tenth case, when the gambit doesn't work, I still gain time to make a phone call to some connections I have."

Peter listened with amazement to the wily Pole's exposition, which sounded irrefutable, like so many statements coming from the East. This was quite different stuff from what they told you at the embassy, where they advised you to stay glued to your documents and to carry a card in your wallet, saying, I am Peter Levi. In Case of Accident, Notify ... etc.--a creepy self-advertisement that Peter up to now had been incapable of penning, even as an exercise in calligraphy. Yet he wondered how his companion, whose age he estimated at 20, could know so much more than seasoned American officials. A tendency to boastfulness was becoming more and more evident in Makowski, as Peter, his foil, became meeker and meeker; it was an effect, he noticed, that he seemed to have on people. He was ashamed to think of the molelike life he had been leading: Since he had left his hotel, nobody ever asked him for his passport, except when he was cashing a traveler's check at American Express--something Makowski, he supposed, would not be caught dead doing. "Number one. they're lazy," his mentor continued. "Number two, they're interested only in their next meal. If you put those two facts together, you've got this country in the hollow of your hand." He scowled at the distant clock on the Montparnasse station. "Have you noticed--there are hardly any clocks in this town? They hate to give away the time, free." Peter laughed. He had made the same observation himself. "Ten past twelve," said Makowski. "The fun here is over. In five minutes, the flics will be knocking off for lunch and Allee-Allee-Out's-in-Free."

Appearances bore him out. The Black Marias at either- end of the block were still waiting, with open doors, and Peter could still hear an occasional far-off police whistle shrill all by itself like Roland's horn, but the householders on the Rue de Rennes had retired from their balconies, shutting their French windows. On the street, the traffic was running normally again, the curious crowds had dispersed and noontime lines were forming at the bakeries. The two cops on the corner were stamping their feet and looking at their watches. Peter's own feet were cold. "You want to have a beer in the café here?" he suggested.

But Makowski was late already for a date with a girl at the Flore. "Why not join us? We can pick up another chick."

Peter was strongly tempted, but he had his plant to take home; he could almost feel it shivering in the autumn wind. Besides, in some crazy way, he felt he owed it to the group in the Black Maria not to leave the scene while they remained in duress, able to watch him depart. Somebody had to hang around, just as a matter of courtesy. "Maybe later," he said. "If you're still there."

Makowski loped off to the bus stop. Too late, Peter realized that he had forgotten to ask him for his address, which meant, he guessed, that he was gone beyond recall. He was not sure how much he really liked the Pole, but obviously, they had something in common as hyphenated Americans of an uncommon kind. A 95 was coming. He watched Makowski get on, not waiting his turn, of course, but charging past a line of people that had been standing there patiently. Peter was spared the pain of grimly noting their reactions, for just then, a small dark student came darting out of a building, chased by a concierge with a broom. Peter recognized one of the leaders of the march. His pursuer, an aged nemesis, was screaming for the police to apprehend him: He had been hiding in the service stairway, she panted, and he had done peepee--"Oui, il a fait pipi dans mon escalier de service!" Immediately, a new throng materialized, laughing and passing the word along, as the boy dodged into a doorway. What floor? a joker demanded. "Le sixième, monsieur," she answered with dignity, resting on her broom and regaining her breath; the gendarmes advanced.

"Il n'était pas pressé," an old man in a tweed overcoat said, winking, to Peter. "Il n'était pas pressé, hein?" the old man repeated, to a workman in coveralls. More people came, pushing and shoving, and the criminal profited from the confusion to race out, zigzag adroitly between them and spring with a bound onto the bus, which had started to move as the traffic light turned green; the ticket taker, like a trained confederate, had quickly released the chain barring entrance to the platform. The boy ducked into the interior of the bus.

The police were slow in reacting; they stood as if mystified on the sidewalk, evidently not grasping where their quarry had got to. Then whistles blew. The cop on the next corner waved to the bus to halt. Peter ground his teeth. It was a tricky intersection, where three streets met--what the Romans called a trivium--an ill-omened juncture. And there were cops, all of a sudden, on every corner. From where he stood, he was unable to see exactly what happened next; but in a minute, the forces of order were dragging the tall Pole to the lettuce basket.

For a moment, Peter was simply stunned. It seemed plain to him that everyone except the stupid police must see that they had got the wrong boy. Yet no one moved to interfere. The concierge of the violated building stood nodding with satisfaction as Makowski was tossed into the paddy wagon. A wild conjecture passed through Peter's head: Could Makowski be doing a Sydney Carton? The Poles were alleged to be quixotic. In any case, he decided to wait till the bus had crossed the Boulevard Raspail, bearing the small demonstrator to safety. Then he counted 20 and sallied up to a gendarme. To his surprise, he did not feel his customary worry about making mistakes in French; the words came out as though memorized ahead of time from a phrase book for this emergency; and in the back of his mind, he recalled with interest the saying of Kant: The moral will operates in man with the force of a natural law.

"Pardon, monsieur l'agent; je peux témoigner pour mon compatriote. Il n'a pris aucune part dans la manifestation. Il ne s'est pas caché dans l'immeuble de madame. Il était à côté de moi, tout le temps, sur la chaussée, en simple spectateur. Et it ne ressemble en aucun détail au jeune homme que vous cherchiez."

The gendarme he was addressing had been joined by two others. Silence. They seemed to be waiting for Peter to continue. But he had stated the facts: Makowski had been standing next to him on the sidewalk during the entire demonstration; he did not bear the slightest resemblance to the suspect they were after. "C'est tout," he added hoarsely. "Croyezmoi." The kids in the Black Maria had slid forward to listen. Makowski was smiling strangely. Peter became aware that he had said pavement when he meant sidewalk. "Je veux dire le trottoir." Without warning, he had started to tremble violently; he saw the Fatshedera quaking in his hand and realized that he was having an attack of stage fright.

It was like the time he had played Jacques in school and had had to lean against a tree in the Forest of Arden and all the scenery shook. He had not grasped at first why the audience of boys and parents was laughing--"Sembrava un bosco di pioppi tremoli," was his father's comment; "A Forest of Aspens." It came to him now that all these people were staring at him dumb-struck because he looked weird with his tall companion plant; the cops probably thought he was a "case."

"Demandez aux autres si vous ne me croyez pas!" he cried, getting angry. "Tout le monde ici peut confirmer que je dis la vérité!" He was not the sole witness to the fact that Makowski had not budged from the curb; there were the flower seller on the corner and the newspaper vendor in her tarpaulin shelter--courtesy France-Soir--and the butchers in their bloody aprons. They had all been standing there like stage extras or a speechless chorus, contributing local color.

"Qu'il parle bien le français!" a voice murmured behind him. Peter disregarded the flattery. He was going to insist that the cops take his testimony.

"Voici mon passeport et ma carte de séjour!"

A shower of membership cards, guarantees and certificates fell to the pavement as he searched wildly in his wallet for his carte de séjour, which to his chagrin was not in his passport; he hugged his plant awkwardly to his body to free a hand. Bystanders picked them up and restored them to him; a young lame girl offered to hold the Fatshedera: "Quelle belle plante!"

The senior gendarme, who seemed to be a sergeant, took the documents and slowly looked them over, frowning at the membership in the Jeunes Ornithologistes de France. "Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?" He found the carte de séjour folded into the yellow health certificate. He studied it. Then he tapped all the documents into a neat pile and handed them back, together with Peter's passport. "Bon. Merci, monsieur. Tout est en règle," he said. "Allons-y!" he shouted to the driver of the Black Maria. The motor started. Peter gulped. They were not going to release Makowski! Apparently, he was supposed to count himself lucky that they were letting him go free. He gave an inarticulate howl of despair.

In back of him, someone coughed imperatively. He heard a hoarse, deep female voice. "Il a raison, messieurs. L'américain vous dit la vérité. L'autre n'en était pour rien. Qu'est-ce que vous faites là? C'est une honte." It was les Journaux in her leather apron and thick sweaters. Peter had always bought the Times and Tribune from her when he lived in the hotel on the Rue Littré; ô juste ciel, she recognized him! He felt a lump in his throat. He had made it; he was finally "accepted" by old Marianne, la France.

And now other "popular" voices were joining in, muttering and grumbling--les Fleurs, a window washer, an old lady with a cane. "Soyez raisonnables! Qu'estce que cela vous fout? Après tout! Un peu de calme! Ce sont des enfants!"

The police sergeant appeared to reflect. His subordinates were watching him. "Vos pa-piers!" he said to Makowski. And, of course, Makowski did not have any. "Et alors?" said the policeman sharply. That settled it. This was France, after all (the embassy was right), and, regardless of any specific charge, not having your papers was prima-facie evidence that you were up to no good.

The attitude of the bystanders confirmed this. "Il n'a pas ses papiers. Zut!" A collective shrug disposed of the Pole, whose broad face had assumed a plaintive, aggrieved, innocent expression, as though he could not dig what this fuss was all about. You would think he was some hayseed who had never heard of a travel document. Peter himself experienced an appreciable drop in sympathy. What a clown!

The doors of the Black Maria were shutting on the heap of sprawling kids. Peter's conscience jabbed him. "Makowski!" he yelled. "Jan! Don't worry! I'll go tell the embassy. Right away, I promise."

"Stay out of this, Peter Pan!" the Pole's voice answered rudely, adding an obscenity that made Peter hope that these French did not understand English. He fell back a step, feeling his neck turn red. It came to him that, insanely, Makowski held him responsible. Doubtless, he had counted on the vérification d'identité taking place later, in relative privacy, at the station house or wherever, when the cops had had their lunch and were in a good humor. But now it was public knowledge that he had been picked up without any papers.

Peter declined to swallow Makowski's tales of mass deportations; that could not happen to American citizens, he felt sure. But in the face of those closed black doors, his confidence was eroding. The tumbrel's engine started. He realized that he did not even know where they were taking Makowski now. The spectators on the corner would not commit themselves. "Sais pas." "Ah, non, monsieur, je ne saurais pas vous le dire." "Peut-être à Beaujon?" "C'est pas mon affaire. Demandez aux gendarmes." But Peter--the old story, he guessed--felt a horrible diffidence about asking the flics outright.

The window washer came to his rescue. "C'est pas la peine, mon gars. Ils ne le disent jamais. La police, vous savez. ..."

The Black Maria's motor was still idling. Once it bore Makowski off, Peter might never be able to find him in the maze of French bureaucracy. With sudden resolution, he banged on the door. A policeman stuck his head out. Peter asked if he could accompany his friend, as a witness. "C'est pas un taxi, monsieur," the policeman retorted, slamming the doors. In the interior, Peter could hear raucous laughter.

"Alors, arrêtez-moi!" he shouted.

"Foutez-moi la paix," came the grumbling reply.

It was typical of the French that if you asked them to arrest you, they would not help you out. In his fury, he thought of a ruse. All he had to do was open his mouth and say "Nazi!" and every flic in the quartier would spring on him. He would not even have to say it very loud. He swallowed several times in preparation. At home, among his peer group, he could speak lightly of the cops as fascists; but now, to his astonishment, his vocal cords felt paralyzed. As in a nightmare, his mouth opened and closed. No sound came out. Yet it was not from fear, as far as he could determine, but from a profound lack of inclination.

His father was always giving people the drill if they used the term fascist when, according to him, they should have used conservative or repressive or just brutal: If you kept throwing that term around, like the boy crying wolf, as an expression of simple dislike, you would be unable to recognize real fascism when and if it came. Peter could not recall all the "objective criteria" that the babbo said had to be present to justify a diagnosis of fascism, but he felt certain the French police would not qualify.

Yet there was more to it than that--some squirming aversion in him, related maybe to delicacy. Actually, he was unable to imagine circumstances in which he would find it easy to call anybody a Nazi, including Hitler, probably. If you called Hitler a Nazi, he would not mind, obviously, so what would be the use?

A flic in a blue cape had emerged from the corner café, where presumably he had been telephoning or answering a call of nature. He barked out an order to the driver. Peter heard the clash of gears. It would be hopeless to chase after the police wagon. Even if it had to stop for the traffic light at the next corner, he would be incapable of keeping up for more than a block, hampered as he was by his plant. Then in the distance, he sighted a taxi coming up the Rue de Rennes. He dashed into the street to flag it down, foreseeing, as he waved, that the driver might decline to follow the panier à salade; they loved telling you no. Closing his eyes, he recited one of his magic formulas: "Perseverance, dear my Lord, keeps honor bright."

"Attention!" someone called.

The police wagon shot backward. Peter jumped out of the way. His heel struck the curb behind him; his ankle turned and his long bony foot got caught in an opening in the gutter. He lost his balance, tried to right himself, throwing out his arms. The Fatshedera was sliding from the crook of his elbow. Endeavoring to catch it, he fell. As he did, a ringing, explosive sound reached his ears, seeming far away; it was the clay pot shattering on the pavement. Somebody was helping him up. They were asking if he was hurt. He stole a glance around. Moist black dirt and reddish shards and slivers of the pot were scattered all over the street and sidewalk; the plant was lying in the gutter with its whitish root system exposed. Les Fleurs carefully picked it up and wrapped it in a newspaper. "Tenez, monsieur." She handed it to him. He thanked her. She meant well, he assumed. But he had seen the crown of pale new leaves lying a yard away, like a severed head, near the Métro entrance. Some passer-by had already stepped on it, leaving a green smear on the sidewalk.

The Black Maria, naturally, had made its getaway, after putting him hors de combat. If Peter had not leaped aside, would the hit-and-run driver at the wheel have jammed on the brakes in time? According to Dag, a lot of "traffic accidents" were really engineered by the Deuxième Bureau. And if the cops killed a person while giving him the third degree, they just stretched the body out on the autoroute on Sunday and called it a highway death. Shaking, Peter sat down on the top step of the Métro entrance and buried his head in his hands. His ankle hurt and, pulling down his sock, he found blood where he had scraped it. Maybe he would get blood poisoning and croak. He ought to find a pharmacy and buy some Mercurochrome, but at this hour they would all be closed, probably. The butchers had taken in the meat, and the fruit-and-vegetable merchants along the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs were covering their produce. Les Journaux was bending over him, wondering if he was all right. He got to his feet. "Votre plante," she reminded him.

He picked it up. In his mind, he mimicked his mother's consoling voice: "Never mind. We'll get another, Peter." Aloud, he cried out, "No!"

While he was sitting there, nursing his ankle, a vile temptation had visited him, whose source was that artful Eve, his parent. There was an amusing plant he had read about in his manual, known as dumb cane, a member of the Dieffenbachia species; when chewed, it paralyzed the tongue. If he were to whip over to Les Halles this afternoon and look for one ... ? Today, as it chanced, was Friday. He thrust the thought from him. He would have no more plants in his Stygian kingdom, no substitutes, successors or duplicates; and, as for the Fatshedera, he would not take it home for decent burial: He would junk old Fats here at the scene of its decapitation--good riddance. Yet a last trace of humanity remained, he was sorry to perceive, in his hardened heart. He could not perform the committal in plain view of les Fleurs, whose stubby chilblained hands had wrapped the grisly trunk in France Dimanche: She would be sorry for her trouble. He would have to wait till he found another trash basket.

• • •

Actually, he disposed of it on American soil, in a wastebasket at the embassy, where he went to report Makowski's arrest to a bureaucrat in the consular section who could not have cared less. "If you students take part in street demonstrations, there's nothing we can do to help you. It's strictly against regulations for American citizens to meddle in French politics."

"He wasn't taking part in a demonstration," Peter protested. "You just wrote that down yourself in your notes. He was standing on the curb, next to me."

The official frowned over his notes. "Ah, yes, so you said. I see it here. Well, all I can tell you is the next time you see a march or a demonstration, walk rapidly in the opposite direction. Don't linger there to gaup. For one thing, you may get hurt. A few years ago, during one of their protest rallies, some bystanders were crushed to death in a Métro entrance. Luckily, there were no Americans among them."

Silence followed. The man fiddled with some papers on his desk. "You mean you won't do anything?" Peter said finally. "Is that the embassy's policy?"

"Consular policy," the man corrected, "is opposed to taking unnecessary action. Your friend's case isn't as unfamiliar to us as you appear to think. Ordinarily, the French police hold these people a few hours, to teach them a lesson, and then let them go."

"Yeah," said Peter, "I've heard that, too. But I've also heard that they deport foreign students they pick up, just like that, without a trial or investigation or anything. Actually, it happened to a friend of mine."

"An American?"

"Well, no."

"Just as I thought. It's rare," he went on in a musing tone, "that they deport an American unless he's been up to some mischief. Odd as it seems, they discriminate, if anything, in our favor. One of those little diplomatic mysteries. It may have something to do with the balance of payments. Every one of you students, you realize, who stays here getting money from home and spending it is hurting the balance of payments."

From the wall, the photo of Lyndon B. Johnson looked at Peter with eyes of reproach. The official leaned across the desk. "And are you sure that this Makowski is a naturalized citizen of the United States?"

"I'm not sure. I only met him this morning. But he talked like an American."

"Didn't you see his passport?"

"That was the whole trouble! I explained to you. They were just going to let him go, when it turned out he'd left his passport at home."

"He didn't describe it specifically as an American passport?"

Peter sighed. "No. Why would he? Imagine anybody saying, 'I left my U. S. passport at home this morning.' I mean, that would imply you had several passports."

"I'm not here to engage in semantics with you. And under the circumstances, I don't see how we can help you. We can't intervene without more information than you've been able to furnish. You have no idea of the number of inquiries we get about you students. Usually from parents, wanting us to find out why Bobby hasn't written. If we called the police and the hospitals about every Tom, Dick and Harry, we'd have no time left for normal consular business." He got up. "Run along, now. If your friend doesn't turn up in a day or two, come back and see me. That's the best I can offer."

"Great!" said Peter bitterly. "You haven't understood the point. I don't know his address. So how can I tell if he turns up or not?"

"You can find him at the Sorbonne, I suppose."

"He's not at the Sorbonne. He's at the Institute of Oriental Languages. And tomorrow is Saturday. The embassy will be closed. By Monday he might have been deported. They give you twenty-four hours to leave the country."

His hoarse voice broke. Some secretaries looked up. In a minute, he supposed, they would call the Marine guard to remove him from the chair to which he remained glued, feeling too weak and dejected to dislodge himself. He remembered that he had not eaten since morning. Then the man reached in his pocket and spoke in a kindlier tone. "I tell you what you do. Here's a jeton. There's a pay phone in the corridor, by the cashier's window. Call the commissariat of the arrondissement where this bagarre took place and ask if they're holding your friend. The commissariats are listed in the front matter of the telephone book. Then come back and tell me the result."

"There won't be any result," said Peter, getting reluctantly to his feet. "You don't know the French, sir, the way a student does. It'll just be a waste of a jeton. Can you figure me trying to spell Makowski to some half-crocked police sergeant? 'MarieAnatolKléberOscarWashingtonSuzanneKléberIrma'?" He gave a hollow laugh. "If you'd call, it would be different. They listen to somebody with authority."

"On your way," said the man. "Right through those doors."

It was just as Peter had prophesied. "They hung up on me," he reported back. "I think they recognized my voice."

For the first time, the official cracked a smile. He chuckled. "Oh, Jesus!" he said. Still overcome by merriment, he pointed to the chair and Peter obediently sank down. He failed to get the joke, but it did not matter. He knew he had crossed the Rubicon. He watched the man pick up the telephone. "Monsieur Dupuy, s'il vous plaît.... Bon, j'attends.... Allô, Jacques? C'est nous encore. Pas mal. Et vous-même? Oui, c'est ça. Une petite bagarre. Comme d'habitude. Vous êtes au courant? Un certain Makowski, étudiant...." He doodled on a pad. "Ah, bon, bon. Merci. À la prochaine fois, Jacques." Jan Makowski, naturalized U. S. citizen, born in Poland, had been released at 3:50 P.M., after verification of his papers.

Peter guessed Makowski had scored, after all. He left the embassy in a good mood. In the end, the vice-consul (he had given Peter his card) had seemed glad that somebody had prodded him into being somewhat better than he customarily was. It was funny how people never remembered the well-known fact that virtue was its own reward but had to keep discovering it as a novelty. In the garden, he paused to pay homage to the seated statue of Ben Franklin in his wide bronze rumpled coat. He liked the patron saint of inventors sitting mildly amid the ornamental shrubbery. He looked homemade, like the funny Stars and Stripes still waving over the embassy's portal. Some English ivy was climbing up his pedestal.

Peter took the lay of the land. Outside the gate, two gendarmes were walking up and down. In the driveway, a chauffeur sat at the wheel of a big black embassy car. But nobody was paying attention to him in the gathering winter dusk. He advanced stealthily toward the statue, taking his time. With his trusty pocketknife, he cut some long shoots of ivy. When one of the gendarmes glanced his way, he had already stored the booty in his sheepskin-lined jacket; the heart-shaped leaves of the Fatshedera's creeping cousin were nestling in his bosom. Hedera helix rooted easily in water, and then you could plant it in earth. Satisfied by this act of vandalism committed on U. S. property, he sped toward the Métro station. The idea that a new denizen of his apartment had been acquired free of charge and at some slight personal risk compensated him for the passing of the old one. Life had to go on. Actually, in the place of one sickly specimen, he could have a whole lusty tribe, in pots, trained on strings to climb up his walls--assuming his landlady's consent. Offering his second-class ticket to be punched by the ticket taker, he felt like Prometheus, with a gift of green fire. The punishment, he expected, would come later, in the guise of a crise de foie induced by the unhealthy French diet.