The Last Days of New Paris

by China Miéville

The sky is screaming. Two Messerschmitts come in below the clouds, chased by Hurricanes. Slates explode under British fire and the planes tear out of their dives. One of the German aircraft coils suddenly back in a virtuoso maneuver with weapons blazing and in a burning gust an RAF plane unfolds in the air, opening like hands, like a blown kiss, fire descending, turning an unseen house below to dust.

Jags of ruin, a fallen outline. Framed against the flat bright sky to the north-east, the Eiffel Tower looms. The tower’s steepling top half dangles where it has always been, where the Pont d’Iéna meets the Quai Branly, above ordered gardens, but halfway to the earth the metal ends. There’s nothing tethering it to the ground. It hangs, truncated. A flock of the brave remaining birds of Paris swoop below the stumps of its struts, forty storeys up. The half-tower points with a long shadow.

When one of the questioners took off his shoe to rub his toe, with boldness not yet characteristic Thibaut took it from the surprised man, picked up a candlestick he had previously dismissed as mere object and placed it inside the old leather.

“Now it’s surreal,” he said. The glances of the selectors—artists, clerks, and curators turned guerilla—had not escaped him.

Surrealist resistance,

For months before the reconfiguration, the Abbé Alesch had been a well-known preacher against the Nazis. A very few intimates had known, too, that he worked as part of Jeannine Picabia’s clandestine network, réseau Gloria. He’d been courier and confidant, able, as a priest, to pass through the zones, carrying messages and contraband. His Gloria comrades called him “Bishop,” and he heard their confessions.

The story had reached Paris with its manifs. Breton, Char, Dominguez, Brauner, Ernst, Hérold, Lam, Masson, Lamba, Delanglade, and Péret, purveyors of the new deck. Genius, Siren, Magus usurping the pitiful aristocratic nostalgia of King, Queen, and Jack. Père Ubu the Joker, his spiraled stomach mesmeric. The cards were made and lost, and sometimes found again. If the war stories were true, a bird-faced Pancho Villa, Magus of Revolution, played by some Gévaudan militant, had saved his fighters from demon-baiting soldiers. In 1946, the cephalopod heads of Paracelsus, Magus of Keyholes, rose from the Seine and sank two Kriegsmarine ships. Freud, Carroll’s Alice, the Ace of Flames, de Sade, Hegel, a beetle-faced Lamiel are rumored to be loose. Thibaut carries

He is trying to speak to the driver. “Morris,” he breathes. “Morris. Violette!”

The room was filling with history, with this ebbing movement, of Surrealism, of Marx and Freud and coincidence, the revolution of cities, liberation, and the random. Knowledge poured out of everyone and left them still knowing, and drunker, their defenses down.

Sam takes two out with witch-blasts, Thibaut a third with an ill-aimed burst of bullets. His heart shakes him. The manif ends another attack with a Surrealist assassination: the man at whom it stares sits suddenly down, undoes his buttons, looks into his body, now a cage filled with angry crows, and is still.