Since then we go once a week to play pinball, always prefaced by a trip first to the Musee d’Orsay to look at the funny faces (while Daddy seethes at the nineteenth-century academicians and the small boy counts the minutes to the Courier de Lyons.) The funny thing is that the café changes the pinball machine every month or so, and it is always, always, an American machine with an American theme. Each machine has an automated bonus, something weird that happens if you get enough points, and there is something rapt and lovely, in this day of virtual everything, about the clockwork nightingale mechanicalness of the pinball machines, about the persistence of their metallic gears and simple slot-and-track devices. So far we have been through major-league baseball, Star Wars (Hans Solo gets blasted into that carbon sheet), Jurassic Park (an egg glows and opens, and a baby dinosaur appears), Gopher Golf (a kind of parody golf, with little chipmunks that jump up, bucktoothed), and, our favorite, Monster Bash (Dracula comes out of his coffin, on a little metal track; Frankenstein, to the accompaniment of suitably stormy music—the lights on the machine actually first go off, a lovely touch—sits up). All the instructions on the machines are in English, of course, as are all the details. (“I love these machines, compared to video games,” another aficionado at the café said to me once, sincerely, as we scored big and watched Dracula creaking out on his mechanical track. “They are, well, so real.”)
We go once a week, always get the same grenadine-coffee-pie combo, leave a ten-franc tip; I am sure that it is illegal for a three-year-old to play pinball, and I am paying protection. After a month or so, though, I noticed something odd. When we began to play, I would always discreetly drag a café chair over from the table and put it alongside the machine for him to stand on. But after we had done this five or six times, over five or six weeks, I noticed that someone had quietly tucked that small café chair under the left flipper, for Luke to stand on. The chair, the little bistro chair, was pushed under the pinball machine, on the left, or Lukeish, side. There was no talk, no explanation; no one mentioned it, or pointed it out. No, it was a quiet, almost a grudging courtesy, offered to a short client who came regularly to take his pleasure there. Nothing has changed in our relation to that café: No one shakes our hands or offers us a false genial smile; we pay for our coffee and grenadine as we always have; we leave the tip we have always left. But that chair is always there.
Papon’s Paper Trail
Bordeaux is the town where France goes to give up. It was where the French government retreated from Paris under fire from the Prussians in 1870, and again from the kaisers armies in 1914, and where, in June 1940, the French government fled in the face of the German advance and soon afterward met not just the fact of defeat but the utter depth of France’s demoralization. A. J. Liebling wrote of those days that “there was a climate of death in Bordeaux, heavy and unhealthy like the smell of tuberoses.” He recalled the wealthy men in the famous restaurants like the Chapon Fin, “heavy-jowled, waxy-faced, wearing an odd expression of relief from fear.” Though the bad peace was ruled from the spa town of Vichy, Bordeaux is the place that gave the surrender its strange, bitter, bourgeois character: a nation retreating from cosmopolitan Paris back to la France profonde.
Bordeaux has always been a trench coat—and—train station, 1940s kind of town, and despite the mediocre, concrete modern architecture it shares with nearly all French provincial capitals, it remains one. The Chapon Fin is still in business, but it is not deathlike—merely nervous and overwrought, in the way of French provincial restaurants since the capitalists trimmed down and the only market left was German tourists.
In the spring of 1998, Bordeaux was invaded again, this time by battalions of lawyers, broadcasters, historians, and journalists, who had come to attend or participate in the trial of Maurice Papon—the former secretary-general of the Gironde, of which Bordeaux is the capital—for complicity in crimes against humanity fifty-five years ago, during the occupation. The Papon trial was the central, binding event of the past year in France, a kind of O.J. trial, without television or a glove. It was the longest, the most discouraging, the most moving, at times the most ridiculous, and certainly the most fraught trial in postwar French history.
On the last day of the trial, Wednesday, April 1, the invasion of the media became an occupation; what seemed like every European journalist resident in France, and a lot of Americans too, descended on the little square outside the Palais de Justice. The convenience of having La Concorde, a stage-set grand café right across from the Palais (doors open to the spring weather, bottles of good wine lined up on the wall), gave the end of the trial a strangely hilarious, high-hearted, yet self-subduing party spirit—a combination of Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party and the Nuremberg trials.
Despite the mob, the national allegiance of every journalist was instantly recognizable. French journalists wear handsomely tailored jackets and share with English rock guitarists the secret of eternal hair: It piles up. Americans, rumpled and exhausted before the day begins, seem to be still longing for Vietnam. Even walking up and down the steps of the palais, they looked as though they were ducking into the backwash of a helicopter rotor, weighed down by invisible dog tags. What really depressed them was the knowledge that their stories about the proces Papon would sneak into the paper only “between blow jobs,” as one said bitterly. The British alone were exhilarated, bouncing around in bad suits. They all speak French, they all knew they would be on the front page, and secretly they knew too that their readers would not be completely unhappy with a story whose basic point was that all foreigners were like that.
The great Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld waited outside the courthouse too. He is in his sixties, spreading at the middle, and was dressed in a black jacket and cloth cap. “If Papon is found guilty, then the appareil of the state will be held responsible,” he was saying to another journalist. “The French people will be saying that there is a limit, you must act on your conscience, even if you are a man motivated not by hatred but by procedures.” Behind him, members of his group, the Association of Sons and Daughters of the Deported Jews of France, were reading out the names of Jewish children whom Papon was charged with having sent to their deaths.
A few moments later three British journalists rushed into La Concorde, having just heard the accused man’s last speech. Like all of Papon’s interventions during the trial, this one was sonorous, unremorseful, and full of literary and artistic reference. As soon as he finished, the three judges and nine jurors had gone to deliberate 764 questions of guilt or innocence, with a tray of sandwiches to see them through the night. The three Brits now sat down and ordered wine and roast chicken, and one began reading his translation of the speech as the others ate: “He said that it was a double scandal, something about Camus in here. Oh, yes, his wife’s favorite writer was Camus.” The reporter looked down at his notes and deciphered. “They killed his wife… I think.” Papon’s wife of sixty-six years had died, at the age of eighty-eight, the week before the trial was to end. “‘In their desperate… desperate search,’ I think you’d put it, ‘for a crime, they have killed her with… petite esprits.’ What would you say? Small guns? Small steps? Little blows? Little blows. De Gaulle gave her a Legion d’Honneur.”