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The barricades had gone up before dawn, metal teeth along the avenue, and by late morning they were ribboned with tricolours, little paper flags, children’s hands, old men’s canes, camera straps, and the patient pressure of a city turning out to remember itself. Paris wore commemoration differently from celebration. There was pride in it, certainly, but also a gravity that sat in the chest. The light was pale and clean, spring light washing stone facades and brass buttons alike, and every so often the wind moved down the boulevard and stirred the flags so that the whole long line of them gave a soft collective shiver.
Ciara’s father had lifted her up long ago, before the crowd thickened too much, and settled her on the broad top rail of the barricade with one arm firm around her middle and the other braced against the cold metal. From there she was above shoulders and hats and the bobbing sea of heads; above handbags tucked under elbows and folded programmes and veterans’ berets and children swinging their legs from parents’ hips. She sat in the crook of him as if it had been built for her, light enough to hold all day, solemn in the way only a small child can be solemn, with her fine face set and her eyes very large.
Around them, adults leaned into the patient hush that gathers before a procession reaches you. Far off, first heard rather than seen, came the low discipline of drums. Then the brass, faint and stately in the distance, a melody carried on the air and broken now and then by the movement of the crowd. Somewhere nearer, a woman dabbed at her eyes before anything had even arrived. Two elderly men in dark coats stood straight as iron fenceposts with medal ribbons pinned to their chests, one of them already gripping his folded cap in both hands. Little children, who had begun the morning wriggling and asking for sweets and craning for balloons, had quieted under the influence of so many serious faces.
Ciara had known, in the way children know things through repetition and image and bedtime cadence, that this was not an ordinary parade. She had been told about the war in a register fitted for her age: not the full black machinery of it, but enough to understand occupation and courage, uniforms and hunger, hidden rooms, brave broadcasts, thin bread, women on bicycles, old men with messages stitched into hems, church bells rung again in freedom, streets full of relieved tears. She had been read picture books in which the sky was always either grey with danger or flooded with release. She had stared at painted soldiers crossing little bridges, at women with pinned hair listening to radios in darkened kitchens, at children her own size looking out from windows as tanks rolled past. She had stored those images somewhere deep and soft inside herself where children keep both fairy tales and truths that have frightened them.
So when the procession finally came into view, it did not arrive to her as disconnected spectacle. It struck against all those waiting images at once.
First came the standard-bearers with their banners held upright in gloved hands, colours rich as chapel glass in the clean day. Then the old veterans, fewer than there should have been, moving in measured lines, their age visible in every careful step and yet made noble by the discipline with which they took it. Medals flashed against dark cloth. Some faces were set forward, trained against public emotion. Some trembled at the mouth. One man’s hand, white-knuckled where it held the staff of his flag, shook not with weakness but with the effort of containing memory inside bone.
Behind them rolled military vehicles polished into ceremony, not menace now but remembrance; engines low, tyres deliberate on the avenue. Women in period dress rode or marched among them, their hair pinned in old-fashioned waves, their skirts moving with the spring air, and somewhere in the middle of it all a group of musicians lifted a wartime tune that seemed to rise right out of the stones. The notes travelled down the barricades and through the crowd like a current. People straightened. Hats came off. Shoulders drew back. Breath caught.
Ciara felt it before she understood it. It came up through her all at once, not as thought but as force. The drums, the flags, the old men, the brass, the sudden nearness of all those stories she had held in picture-book colours and bedtime words—something in the procession unlocked them and let them flood bright and unbearable through her small body. The avenue before her was full of uniforms and standards and history, but in her it became also attics and whispers, resistance leaflets, shuttered windows, hidden radios, midnight fear, then bells and sunlight and people spilling into streets. Her mouth parted. Her eyes shone too quickly. A wetness gathered there before she seemed to know it.
Cormac feeling the change in the small body against his arm, looked at her rather than the parade.
She did not look back.
Instead she pulled one hand free from where it had rested on the barricade, made a fist for the effort of lifting it, then thrust two tiny fingers upward into the spring air, not clumsy at all but startlingly exact, the little V angled above the sea of adult heads with all the conviction in the world. Tears brimmed, making her lashes stick together, but they did not break the line of her face. Her voice, when it came, was high and clear enough to cut through brass and murmurs and the rustle of programmes.
“Viva La France! Viva La France!”
The words cracked out of her with the force of something much larger than a child’s lungs should have carried. For a beat after, it was as though the nearest section of the crowd had forgotten how to move. Heads turned. Faces lifted toward the source of the cry. A woman below put her hand to her mouth. One of the veterans nearest the barricade blinked upward in naked surprise. A little pocket of silence opened around the sound she had made, the rare silence of people struck directly in the heart before they have decided what to do with it.
Then it went through them.
It started in a handful of expressions changing at once—surprise softening into wonder, wonder opening into joy, joy into something fiercer and more tender than either. The woman with her hand to her mouth began to clap first, hard and immediate, as if compelled. The man beside her followed. Then another, and another, and then the whole bank of people along that run of barricade broke into applause that leapt outward and took hold. Cheering rose with it, not rowdy but full-throated and bright. Flags waved harder. Faces turned upward toward Ciara and then outward toward the procession again as if connecting the child’s cry to the larger body of the day. A veteran, passing slowly, tipped two fingers from his brow in grave acknowledgment before his composure gave way to a smile he had not intended to show anyone. Another lifted his chin with watery pride. Someone shouted approval from farther back in the crowd, then others answered with a swell of voices that rolled along the avenue.
Cormac did not hush her. Did not laugh. Did not tell her to sit still or mind herself or lower her hand.
He smiled.
It came over his face slowly and completely, the kind of smile that begins in the eyes because the heart has already been taken. He tightened his hold around her middle, not to restrain but to gather her in, and turned just enough that he could press her small body close against him without lowering the arm she still held aloft. His cheek brushed the side of her head. The gesture had no showiness in it, no need for performance. It was instinctive and full. His daughter on the barricade, tiny hand raised in victory, tears bright on her cheeks, voice still hanging in the spring air above the cheering crowd and the old soldiers and the avenue dressed in memory.
The applause kept going. It did not embarrass her into silence. If anything, it seemed to hold her where she was, that little hand still up, fingers parted in their imperfect, earnest V. Cormac's embrace closed around her more securely. The barricade hummed faintly under the pressure of bodies leaning forward. Flags snapped and settled. Brass carried on. The procession moved beneath a sky washed pale above Paris, and the crowd, startled into feeling by a five-year-old child with tears in her eyes, answered her with cheers that swelled and swelled while she remained there in her father’s arm, hand still raised over the tricolours.