THE SIEGE OF THE ODEON: MAY 1968

GARRY O'CONNOR

'WHERE do you live?' 'In the Boulevard Henri IV. In a chambre de bonne.'

'How many flights up?' 'Eight!'

Both of them winced.

'It's not so bad once you reach the top. The corridor's a bit draughty.' I was being more kind to the place than it deserved: in the corridor the windows were smashed, and — aside from the usefulness of drying my hands and face in the fresh air When I couldn't find a towel — this had an abominable trick of making me vertiginous. In reality, the room was a glorified rat-hole, defiled by droppings from every aerial marauder; the bed lay sandwiched under the Sloping roof, so if I rose too quickly, without thinking, I hit my head. The most intoler- able factor was loneliness. 'Still, very cheap, I expect.'

I felt J.F. probably wanted to like me, but was suspicious because I was not leading quite the right sort of life. I had deliberately sunk to poverty. What, he must have wondered, was my motive?

'Well,' he said, 'what about supper?' He turned to me. 'You must be hungry.'

I was not built to withstand solitude, although I defended it that evening in an argument with Gaby and J.F., as if it was my oldest friend. Refusing their offer to drive me back afterwards — I didn't want them to patronise me — I walked along the Seine in an easterly direction. The reality of what I had so hotly justified began to gnaw at my insides, leaving me sick and empty. I had not the simplicity to be truly alone.

THE Sorbonne had been occupied by stu- dents. Barricades had gone up in the Latin Quarter. On a night in mid-May the prefect of police told his minister of the interior that he could not keep order unless the barri- cades were taken down. Students in the rue Gay-Lussac resisted; cars were set on fire; paving stones, cobbles, ripped up; shop fronts smashed. The police kept cool. No one on either side was killed. But 30,000 students were now facing the water cannon and batons of the Republican guards, the CRS, bawling 'CRS — SS! CRS — SS!'

I had asked Gaby to a ballet while J.F. was away on a computer course. She wore a dress of green silk, which clung to her figure and heightened the dark sheen of her hair; her eyes shone. She did not seemed fright- ened by venturing into the Latin quarter. The tobacco kiosks by the metro Odeon were open, the passers-by neither agitated nor unduly circumspect.

`I feel something odd is going to happen,' Gaby remarked when we had settled down in our seats.

`Why?'

`Everything seems too normal.'

I did not understand.

`The crowd is too composed. Too careful- ly distributed.' It was a young audience, but the American company was also young.

Unexpectedly Gaby placed her hand in mine, and a deep look of happiness flashed into her eyes. I forgot about everything else.

At the end, after applause which started warmly and spontaneously, it became un- usually quiet. Then hundreds of students with red and black flags, with arm-bands, with banners inscribed `Don't come back, God, the world is crumbling round you' — or the initials of their own organisation — began filing down the aisles on to the stage, or through the corridors at the back of the stairs and into the loges and galleries. Soon there were even more people standing behind the seats than in the seats them- selves.

I insisted that Gaby leave, but she wanted to stay. I said it could be dangerous, but she disagreed.

For the next hour nothing much hap- pened. The atmosphere was desultory. Gaby grew bored. Again I told her to go.

The theatre was still filling up with people who had probably never set foot in such a building during their whole lives. Many half-balding or greying men of 35 or more had assembled under a banner inscribed, `The more I make revolution, the more I make love.'

I took Gaby out. She had a dog in a flat, a terrier, which needed exercising. We stood for a moment on the top of the wide flight of stairs. Even more groups were pouring in. One bore a placard, 'II est interdit d'inter- dire.'

`Please?' said Gaby.

`I must go back,' I said.

INSIDE they were screaming at a middle- aged professor that he was a `selectionise — for he favoured selecting students to follow a university course. Shouting that his other crime was of not being working-class, they started to threaten him with blows.

Then a hiatus: no one knew what to say. A red-headed, jovial-faced man popped up on the stage like a jack-in-the-box or the devil in a morality play: `Let the professor explain himself,' he declared. `And if we think he's a bastard we'll tell him, "Mon- sieur Blanc, you are a bastard": Monsieur Blanc spoke at length, but soon a murmur grew, and this silenced him. The air became so stuffy I thought I would faint. On the worn, creaking boards of the stage hundreds of people were crammed together. Some were leaving for fear of suffocation. At the back was an eerie, dark little passage leading down one side of the stage to the other. Underneath it was hollow. Perhaps the floor would not hold: what if three or four hundred went crashing down into the chasm? That might supply a fitting end, the final scene of a Jacobean revenge play.

Everyone now talked at once. Order did not exist; licence was without licence: there were not two sides to any question but twenty, fifty, a hundred. There was no chairperson — no master or mistress of ceremonies — it would have been a symbol of hierarchy, of oppression. Everything was equal now. Every blade of grass had a tongue.

Actors tried to speak — neat, well- shaven, ordinary men and women; musi- cians, artists with the beards of anarchists. They told each other that bourgeois culture was dead. The Odeon — a symbol of repression — had been seized. Now it was dead. Henceforth it would be a political forum. Malraux, Barrault, Claudel, Mes- siaen, Boulez etc, they now no longer existed.

`The past is bourgeois propaganda,' boomed a deep voice.

I went backstage to tour other parts of the building: the dressing-rooms had been turned into kitchens or dormitories. I tip- toed from room to room, fearful I might provoke the numerous two-backed beasts under blankets. No one seemed much bothered. Shame? They had abolished that too.

THE hearts of those first thousands were bitter. They were persecuted: they seethed with injustice. Millions of words poured out. But as time went on and the persecutors were nowhere to be seen, and as the victims retired, from time to time, to their families for lunch — or to their beds at night — the irritability wore off. Threatened by dispersal — or by counter-factions — the crowd had grown. Now, mysteriously, what was left began to rot away.

`You'll get the plague if you stay,' Gaby had said. All that filth. There'll be rats. You'll see.'

I had laughed in disbelief. Then one day they appeared. Great brown things, their bodies could be seen bobbing among the filth accumulating under the stage.

Above, and in the auditorium, the debate continued without halt. Backstage the dressing-rooms overflowed with stench. First used for rutting, they had become a cesspit. Vandalism was rife, obscenities scrawled everywhere, light fixtures broken, mirrors cracked, costumes and make-up strewn over everything.

In the costume stores there was worse havoc. At first these had stayed locked — until broken into from skylights above.

I did not get very far. Walking down a corridor, I found myself seized from behind.

My assailants were two fair-haired men, naked to the waist, scarves round their necks and army fatigue caps on their heads. Their grip was like steel. It would have been useless to resist. Anyway, they had a pur- pose — they were propelling me in a certain direction.

`Where are you taking me?'

They did not answer. They pushed open doors ahead with their feet. They looked older than the students and felt like military professionals.

Breathless with fear and exertion, 'I work for an English paper,' was all I could manage — as if this might confer immunity.

`We know,' one of the men answered bluntly. `We were told.'

Pushed at the speed I was, I still took in the contents of the warren. One room where hundreds of 17th-century costumes for Mohere and Racine lay scattered, had be- come a parlour for clochards. The brutal- looking, gap-toothed man from the Ile Saint-Louis and his old woman who pushed a pram from which dangled stockings of uneven length, laughed and waved. Godot had arrived. Estragon and Vladimir had infiltrated the headquarters of Alceste and Harpagon.

The next store was a `medical centre' — so one of my captors told me: on duty was a motley collection of half a dozen lunatics in white coats. They seemed more like junkies or members of the Living Theatre than real doctors or medical orderlies.

At last we slowed down: heaped in the middle of the largest of the costume stores was an odd assortment of weapons. Crow- bars, axes — the theatre fire axes — cudgels, chains, chunks of masonry, and Molotov cocktails. We had reached the inner sanctum, the arsenal. My first inclina- tion was to laugh, more from nerves than anything else.

'Who are you?' I asked.

THERE were between 20 and 25 of them. A leader stepped forward. He was dark- haired, the hair close-cropped and thinning, but skilfully cut to give an appearance of firmness. His forehead was lined — not by thought but, I guessed, by screwing his eyes up in extreme heat and glare. He was a big fellow, over six foot, and looked fit. He had narrow, small eyes, and he gave the impress- ion that he could easily become violent.

Yet he spoke mildly enough — as if playing down the violent side.

'We heard the call of the students,' he said slowly, chewing over his words. 'As we hadn't any education, we decided to join in and place our physical strength at the service of the revolution.'

They were mercenaries.

'You must be the Katangais,' I said. 'I've heard about you. But I didn't know you were here. When did you come?'

They got their name from the fact that some had been in Katanga — but others in Korea, Algeria and Indo-China. Wherever a dirty war needed to be fought, they fought it, the dirtier the better.

They said nothing.

'The pay here can't be very good.'

I regretted saying this. It slipped out. I had cast a slur on their altruism. They would beat me for it. I braced myself for their response.

Surprisingly, they did not seem to mind. 'There isn't much work around for us at the moment,' one said.

'So how do you envisage your role in the revolution?' I asked nervously — as they seemed ready to talk.

'We have founded the CIR,' the leader said. The CIR, he explained, was the Committee of Rapid Intervention.

'But why did you come to the theatre?'

At this they went silent, and appeared to rumble with bellicose intentions. I thought I had better not press the question.

'Please, what do you want with me?' 'You must stay with us,' he answered. 'In case there is trouble.'

His purpose was plain. I was a hostage.

It was ridiculous. No one would ever pay a ransom. I believe I spotted, among the Katangais, a blond, teutonic looking man with blotchy skin who wore spectacles and who was an acquaintance of Gaby. We had spoken once in the street. Perhaps I could get a message out. I tried hard to catch his eye, but the man avoided me, half hidden behind a comrade, seizing the chance, when it came, to slip away.

They brought me food — a baguette which was slightly stale and tasted rubbery, and some cheese — and poured out wine. But the enormity of my trap grew on me. The siege might go on for ever. The authorities had lost interest — or so they pretended. They had thrown the dog a bone and were waiting till he grew tired of it. Troops, paddy wagons, were out of sight; police pickets stood around casually.

Who was there to care about me? Who even knew where I was? I had sunk without trace.

What did these Katangais care about justice? I looked over their solid, reliable frames. But they had no value, even to the students. One told me later that they had been driven out of the Sorbonne by 200 students.

THE nights were worst. I could not sleep. I remained staring in the dark — it had captured my brain. What if I myself dis- solved in the dark?

I fought against the darkness. I listened to the sounds outside — and inside my head. Sometimes the rain outside was fierce. I closed my eyes.

I opened my eyes. How could I keep them closed when I could not sleep? The same darkness was brooding round me. God in heaven, how black it was.

But once — just once — it became by some mysterious transformation as if I was sitting before a great fire whose power of warmth crept over my whole body. In it I could trace many strange faces and different scenes. By dawn it had gone out.

After three nights of this fighting, this resisting and attacking, growing more and more nervous and fearful, I fell at last into a sleep.

Towards next morning, when I woke up, my despair was gone, my depression and pain ended. A line from a poem drifted into my head: 'Oh maison, 014 done est ton maitre?'

CRS and gendarmes surrounded the theatre: they were helmeted and armed with tear-gas grenades. The word went round that the theatre was about to be re-cocupied by the authorities.

'What will happen?' I asked one of my guards.

He sighed. 'Negotiations....'

`No fighting? No last ditch stand? What's happened to the spirit of Katanga?'

'Jackie's not negotiating with the police,' he said aggressively. 'He's negotiating with the television and film people. Some Amer- icans are offering a big fee.'

Once a mercenary, always a mercenary. If I had money, I would pay them to make a last stand.

'But how much would you ask — to put up some resistance to the police?'

The other dropped his usual air of lassi- tude. 'Why? Can you pay?'

He was about to go and fetch the others. 'No,' I said, 'it was purely an academic question.'

The guard shrugged. 'Let those who want come out, do it now,' a voice that we could just about hear floated up from a hailer outside. 'They will be free if they leave without weapons, and without any bellicose intentions.'

I looked at my captor.

'Where does that leave me?'

'Shut up,' he said, 'I told you we have to await the results of negotiations. Jackie's down there now.'

Another Katangais put his head round the door.

'Come on: the order has come through. We're going.'

'What about him?' asked the guard, meaning me.

'He's nothing to do with us now.'

They left me where I was.

THE vast inside of this great theatre lay empty now, sullied, desecrated, battered, but in one piece — like the yawning mouth of a giant. The air seemed irredeemably fouled: the exhaust gases of idealism and spontaneous expression. The theatre's ghosts had suffered wholesale extermina- tion.

I beat the Katangais to the exit, and hid in an arch to watch them come out. They emerged clean, well-shaven, their clothes crisp and pressed. They walked upright, without looking at anyone.

In the street quite a crowd had collected. The Katangais presented their papers to the police control and marched off without a word.

The rest of the occupants who followed them out were a motley bunch. Several young couples with children, school kids, the tottering clochards, some gangs of wild, hairy ones of both sexes, called les farouches.

I walked down the steps and presented my papers. Not an eyebrow raised; not a question put.

Some top police brass assembled in the square. Prefects, sub-prefects, stood to attention. The mayor complimented the police on the 'cleansing of the public build- ing'. An officer in plain clothes climbed out on to the roof of the Odeon, and removed the red and black flags. He was politely applauded by those who watched. The French tricolour was soon fluttering over the weather vane, but there had been no time to erase the 'Ex-' prefixed to the 'Theatre de France' on the entablature. In the rue Casimir Delavigne a young man opened a window on the second floor, and started jeering and shouting: it needed all his father's strength to grab him and haul him back inside.

C) Gary O'Connor 1988

In 1986 Gary O'Connor was based in Paris where he worked freelance for the Financial Times. His Sean O'Casey: a Life has just been published (Hodder and Stoughton, f17.95). This documentary recreation of the Siege of the Odeon is based on memory and the evidence he collected at the time.