"Where Am I Now?"

Spring, always as much mockery as miracle, mocked 1950's anxieties with an especially gracious approach in some of the lands where anxiety was tightest.

In Spain, an unprecedented wave of religious fervor swept a country in which life, year by year, gets harder. From Malaga to Zamora and from Murcia to Pamplona, thousands of black-robed, black-hooded men, carrying a cross in one hand, a torch in the other, formed endless Holy Week processions. Madrilenos also pushed baby carriages loaded with infants, black bread, sausage and wine into the country for Easter picnics, saw the Castilian plateau in an almost forgotten dress. Since 1942 central Spain has been brown and barren with drought. Last week the plain was alive with white and yellow flowers; trees that had seemed dead last summer were budding again, and water sparkled in stream beds dry for years. But even looking at the unaccustomed softness of the land, Spaniards could not put aside their apprehensions. Their government was spending its last gold reserves for wheat. Unless this year's crops in Spain were unusually good or unless help came from outside, there would be famine in Spain next winter.

Afternoon of a Gendarme. In France early last week, the weather was drizzly and cold; the best that could be got out of the weather bureau was like the forecasts of the economists: given time, things would probably improve. On Good Friday the sun burst out, warming France and all Western Europe. Paris churches were crowded on Good Friday afternoon. At 3 p.m. that day, at the church of St. Germain-l'Auxerrois, many of the faithful were so intent on their devotions that they did not notice a young man with a glue-tipped stick niching notes from the poor box. He, in turn, was so intent on his task that he did not notice the police until they had him.

In Notre Dame Cathedral on Easter morning, just as Archbishop Maurice Feltin was chanting the Credo, Michel Mourre, a 22-year-old former student for holy orders, dressed in a rented Dominican monk's robe, climbed into the pulpit, grabbed the microphone and roared: "God is dead! I accuse the Catholic Church of infecting the world with a funeral spirit." Some of the congregation of 10,000 rushed forward to drag Mourre from the pulpit. Three of his friends, standing at its foot, threw firecrackers in the faces of the infuriated faithful. Gendarmes arrested Mourre and his three friends.

That night the police combed the Left Bank looking for associates' of the four they had arrested. They should have looked in the Cafe L'Oasis, near the Pont Louis-Philippe, where, for years, two clubs have met: "Les Insulaires," a group of small merchants who liked to read their poems to each other, and the "Orpheon Cydo-Artiste-Cercle," a group dedicated to playing the flute while riding bicycles. The two groups had got alone fine for years until Mourre" deserted his religious studies and joined the Insulaires. After that meetings grew so noisy with debate that the members could not hear each other's poems. Last Sunday evening all was quiet at the Oasis. One of the little merchants, feeling the influence of spring, rose shyly and said: "I have a poem." He read it. It was about love.

On the Champs Elysees a pert little streetwalker, old enough to remember tussles with loud and lusty liberating G.I.s in the Place Pigalle, tolerantly watched a fat and fatherly U.S. Army master sergeant padding down the street, Leica and guidebook in hand, followed at two paces by his German wife, at two paces more by his two blond children. "Man Dieu," she murmured to a grinning policeman, "how the Americans have changed."

French Communists felt the dialectical sap rising in their veins. They rioted. A try at wrecking the conservative newspaper Le Figaro brought out their old opponents, the cops. One camera caught cop and Commie in a balletlike tableau (see cut) which suggested a title--The Afternoon of a Gendarme. French ports were tense as Communists still tried to whip up the dockers to strike ships bearing U.S. aid to France. On the whole, however, Frenchmen last week were as lighthearted as men may be who live with no more in the backs of their minds than an unstable government at home, a half-barbarian horde of Russians near by and an atomic war on the horizon.

Buzzing for a Barrister. In Britain, 1950's spring lined up to the world's best advertised standards. Daffodils on the hill sides, primroses in the hedges, a new bear cub at the London Zoo and a burgeoning of anxiety (in very British guise) in the London Times advertisements. "Unidentified continuous vibratory noise in the atmosphere," wrote an elderly barrister. "Will those who have heard this please write to me?"

Thousands of other Britons sought spring on the Continent, which they regard as economically unsound and politically untouchable. For the long Easter weekend, a Continent-bound plane left British airfields every five minutes. In April's opening week there were 8,000 such escapist flights from England.

Bell-Ringers for Waitresses. In Germany, spring and anxiety merged in the dread of what the Communists might do on Whitsuntide (see FOREIGN NEWS).

In Japan, across the world, people were no less grateful for spring, no less confused and bewildered than the Europeans whose bewildering civilization the Japanese were trying to fuse with their own. Last Saturday the sun came out between showers, and Japanese hurried purposefully about their beloved hanami, the flower-viewing.

In Tokyo's sprawling red-light district, other Japanese revived a rite of spring. For centuries up to 1913, the annual parade of Tokyo's fairest prostitutes had been a vernal harbinger as reliable as the appearance of the first robin. Under U.S. regulations prostitutes are outlawed, but Tokyo's brothels, thinly disguised as "teahouses," still cater to an average of 500 customers nightly. Last week, each leaning on an attendant and trying her best to walk in the traditional graceful gait of her calling, under the weight of a 6-lb. wig and suffocatingly embroidered antique costume, two of Tokyo's leading "waitresses" led a regiment of lantern-bearers, bell-ringers, apprentice prostitutes and child attendants through the ancient three-hour procession. "We're certainly not trying to revive interest in prostitution," explained a spokesman for Tokyo's procurers' association, "but we felt that since peace had come back and spring is here, we'd like the people of Tokyo to get a look at what the old days were like."

Cyanide for Supper. To many a Japanese, trying in vain to cope with a U.S. economic program which seemed only to produce less money and more hardships, the old days seemed the best days. At week's end a 42-year-old Tokyo factory worker, Hiroshi Hori, took his wife and five children to view the cherry blossoms in Sumida Park. When they got home Mrs. Hori cooked up some bitter-tasting bean" paste for supper. The four younger children refused to eat it. Next morning they found their father, mother and eldest sister dead of cyanide poisoning. "Due to living difficulties," once-wealthy Father Hori had written, "the family is committing suicide."

Sang a Japanese poet last week:

"How the people crowd the streets.

So many of them die in suicides and

murders.

I raise a cry for help.

Where have I been? Where am I now?"

In the spring of 1950, lovely as it was, that seemed to be the prevailing sentiment all over the world.

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