Excerpt of I Burn Paris

seconds on their smoking machines in a feverish race of fingers, tangled and hoarse from silently screaming, that seemed to mutter: “I’m the fastest! Don’t pick me! Not me!”

Day in, day out, in some corner of the hall, the cruel, sloped handwriting of steps would come to a full stop, and a flat, expressionless voice would break the tense silence: “Pack up your tools!”

Then a few hundred chests would heave a sigh of relief like a blast from a ventilator: “So it’s not me! Not me!” Hastily, even more quickly, the trained fingers grabbed and grafted and wound second upon second, link upon link of the iron, eight-hour chain.

Pierre had gotten word: the politically suspect were the first to go.

He had nothing to worry about. He kept his distance from agitators.

He didn’t attend rallies. During the last strike he had broken the picket line. The tub-thumpers had scowled at him. When he saw the foreman he always tensed his lips into a friendly smile.

In spite of all that, whenever the foreman began his silent, malevolent stroll through the hall, Pierre’s fingers tangled in anxiety; the tools flew from his hands, and he would leave them where they fell, for fear of calling attention to himself. Beads of sweat moistened his feverish body like a cold compress.

But when the ominous steps stopped abruptly before his workstation that morning, when his gaze read the sentence from the sketch on the foreman’s lips, Pierre unexpectedly felt something like relief: So this was the end!

Taking his time, he leisurely packed his segregated tools into his bundle. He looked at no one else as he started to remove his overalls and carefully wrap them in paper.

When his food tokens were being counted out in the secretary’s office, it turned out that someone had stolen his micrometer.

The faultless mechanism of the factory administration transferred him to the office of the inspectorate. In the office, a bald, cross-eyed clerk laconically informed Pierre that the factory would be docking him 12