MY DREAM OF THE LINGERING PARIS

85. MY DREAM OF THE LINGERING PARIS:

I crossed the border with a certain boredom - as if one place or the other wouldn't really matter - and this particular crossing was funny in that MOST people otherwise would think nothing of it but my mind was racing as if in wartime at the very end of WWII when fractious border controls were everywhere in flux and people were running scared between provinces and towns and areas of one allegiance or another and everything crumbling around them and Liberation was coming and everyone soon would have to pay for the actions they'd taken during occupation and all the rest and by contrast this stupid little passage from one place to another was actually nothing and had no consequence and was done constantly all the time and no one said a word and because of that I decided to WALK not ride over the bridge just to see what the feeling could be like and to mingle with all the others doing the same and I quickly got to the other side and the sign said 'Welcome blah blah' like usual and then it said - facing the other way - 'No Horses on the Bridge' by which of course I was greatly relieved and then it said 'Walk Bicycles do NOT ride on Bridge' which in turn confused me as there were cars endlessly driving by slowly and people walking to and fro and what difference would a few bicycles make ? but I soon learned the reason was that there was really no place FOR the bicycles to ride and the tendency was for groups of bicycle riders to come all at once - part of group rides - and it often really did cause problems so now the policy was that the bicycles needed to be walked across with the rider also (of course) walking alongside the bike (which actually doubles that little bit of traffic each time but whatever) and it was all getting way too complicated so I let it go at 'glad for horses' and walked on and then I remembered pictures I'd seen of the Post-Liberation Paris crowd and the groups of women with shaved heads whose heads had been shaved precisely because they were partisans or traitors or whatever and had been found to be commingling or sleeping or whatever with the Germans the Occupiers the bastards the late LOSERS of this war and so much for COLLABORATORS they should die and all these women had their heads shaved and were marched like prisoners themselves across some Parisian bridge and into the town- square with people jeering and local villagers from other places shouting and spitting and I figured how weird that must have been - violating something crossing borders of the mind making the wrong choice (like bicycling over the bridge) and getting caught because of it but - I also figured - it couldn't be SOO bad : after all hair grows back they were probably lucky to have sex during wartime and were - at some point - all the happier for it too.
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And then also the smoke lingered everywhere and the ruins and the crumbling battered buildings still smoldering with pockmarks and bomb-craters and the open ruins of walls and doorways stairways and alleys - everything all messed up and almost but not quite rubble and it went on for street after street in city-centers and town-squares and churches and graveyards and memorials to this or that previous carnage and the parklands turned to waste and people sleeping wherever they could and everything together resembled anarchy but in some ways a GOOD anarchy something without any rules and references and with the past all gone and no 'return to yesterday' on everyone's mind just instead the mindless wide-open space of the NEW future or whatever it was to be and the old bridges if still connected to something went to their other sides which were sometimes still in place and other times rubble just the same and where there were no bridges left the people improvised and rafts and barges and boats and anything else was used to cross and the passage was whatever it needed to be - free or a fraction or whichever came first - but all of that was then and today's little bridge crossing BY COMPARISON A JOKE acts as nothing so much as a spree a welcome walk to something else and that's the way it is these days HORSES and BICYCLES be damned for no one makes a move nowadays to do anything out of the ordinary ever at all.