Ignorance (2 page)

Now Madame Baudry came out of her shop with Marie-Angèle beside her, both moving stiffly in their thick winter clothes. Look sharp, Jeanne! Stop scowling, Marie-Angèle! Madame Baudry’s words puffed out as frosty clouds. She shooed us up the steep, narrow streets between grey buildings fitting together like teeth. From time to time we stopped, to give her a rest. Her navy-blue coat no longer closed over her belly. Her brown felt hat shaded her eyes. I clumped in my newly mended boots we had collected from Monsieur Fauchon the week before, banging my feet down as hard as possible on the transparent ice sheeting puddles. It cracked, shattered into dark glass stars, which sank. My wooden soles tapped morse code on the paving-stones I want to go home I want to go home.

We climbed up a series of stone staircases tucked in between tall houses. The town rippled down at us like icicles. A frozen grey waterfall. I hung on to the iron handrail and kicked each worn step. The grey morning, freshening with misty drizzle, smelled of horse dung. Church bells clanged somewhere ahead. I dawdled as much as I could but Madame Baudry tugged me along. Be good! You’ve promised to be good!

Hand in woollen hand, the three of us began to cross the Place Ste Anne just below the château, making for the door in the high façade opposite. Above this entrance, on a ledge, stood a statue of Sainte Anne, with her little daughter, the Virgin Mary, leaning against her knees. Sainte Anne held a copy of the Old Testament, so that the Virgin could learn to read. The New Testament ended with everything burning up. Everyone dying in flames. I had got to walk in under the statue, under the stone book. I crossed my fingers the end of the world wouldn’t come yet; that we’d be saved. That Maman wouldn’t die.

The convent and the school sheltered behind a granite veil pierced by peepholes. Square barred windows at ground-floor level, rows of tall rectangular windows on the upper floors,
œil de bœuf
windows right at the top. Round, sleepy eyes gazing out under stone eyelids. Where the wall of the school ended, the next building began, on the left-hand side. On the right of the school: the convent, and next to it the chapel, a gold cross on its roof.

Oh, my legs, said Madame Baudry, panting. Catching her breath, her hand at her side. We paused. She was gasping. Holding herself in. I could tell she didn’t like our seeing how weak she felt, and so I looked away, towards the flat front of the building joined on to the school. Following my gaze, Madame Baudry pursed her mouth. She straightened up, adjusted her hat. Now her voice sounded strong again. He does all right for himself. All right for some. They know how to manage, those Jews. We let them in, we let them have jobs. And now, the money that they’ve got squirrelled away!

My nose was running. I fished in my pocket for my handkerchief. Maman had no money. Had she ever been a proper Jew? Marie-Angèle sang: squirrel squirrel squirrel! Madame Baudry glanced at me, then added: well, of course, as long as they try to fit in with us and be like us, they’re all right. Live and let live, I say.

Marie-Angèle pinched my arm. I looked up. The door opened and a man emerged. White, gaunt face. Untidy black hair. He hunched inside a big overcoat. Madame Baudry immediately called out, saluting him.
Bonjour
, Monsieur Jacquotet! She wished him good day, I knew, because she liked to be recognised by everybody, but he just looked from side to side, like a shy kid in the playground. Madame Baudry persisted, because she was used to everybody knowing she was there, and that she mattered. Serving in the grocery shop, she wasn’t a woman who worked so much as a queenly mother who enjoyed the way people needed her provisions. Briskly she wrapped up their packets of macaroni, sugar, chicory, flour and salt. Sometimes, if I’d been summoned up from the bottom town to keep Marie-Angèle company, and we’d run out of games to play, Madame Baudry let us help her serve customers, dip the wooden scoop into the bin of dried beans, tip them out on to the scale, fiddle out the brass weights from their wooden box. The curé used to buy his sisters barley-sugars from Madame Baudry’s shop and post them home. Once we started boarding, he’d bring some in for Marie-Angèle and me. He said: you two mopes need cheering up! On his Sunday afternoon visits to the convent he gave me news of my mother. He visited her in hospital, so that he could tell me how she was keeping. She’s fine, Jeanne, never you fear.

Marie-Angèle poked me with her elbow. She whispered: look at his big nose!

He was pretending he hadn’t seen us, hadn’t heard Madame Baudry’s greeting. He jerked his face away. He withdrew, back inside the house, and slammed the door.

The hermit, Madame Baudry said: the recluse. So unsociable! He thinks I don’t know about him but I do. Everybody does.

Distracted from her aches and pains, she was in a better mood, so I could risk asking her a question.

What’s a recluse?

So she recounted the tale. Marie-Angèle began smiling now, because her mother was keeping us company for five minutes longer, before delivering us in at the high wooden door. She could still hold her gloved hand, look into her face as she spoke. Coming from a foreign background, he was always a bit of a misfit. He and his wife didn’t mix with their neighbours. They kept themselves very much to themselves. He kept his wife hidden away. Then, when she died, he went a bit crazy.

Marie-Angèle corrected her mother: he kept his beautiful young wife hidden away. Then, when she died, he went a bit mad.

Madame Baudry continued her recital. So now he pretended that he was gone too. He kept the shutters fastened in the daytime and took no notice when boys threw stones at them, rarely went out, crossed to the other side of the street when he saw people coming. Goodness knows what he found to do, alone in that house. He was certainly a bit peculiar.

Marie-Angèle said: you forgot to tell the bit about his eating such strange food!

Madame Baudry shrugged. I understood he might soon cease interesting her. A lost cause. Other stories would press in, replace his. But Marie-Angèle’s eyes gleamed. She said: and nobody knows how his wife died. Madame Baudry said: well, let’s say she died mysteriously. Marie-Angèle chimed in: Bluebeard!

I’d only dared read that story once. The young woman trapped inside the courtyard, no way out, the sun beating her head like a gong of death, the enraged husband, the huge Blackamoor, striding nearer and nearer, his upraised sabre about to whistle down, slice her skin, cause her unimaginable agony. He was coming to get you. You had no choice, you couldn’t hide, you were powerless, your death advanced second by second, closer and closer. A gilded purple turban, a gold coat and gathered gold trousers, slippers with curled-up toes, his black eyes shot red sparks, his beard sprang out like blue spittle. He would hack at you and hurt you, his curved scimitar blade jabbing and slicing your flesh while you writhed and begged for mercy, he laughed, his blade twisting inside the mouth of your wound, blood everywhere, blinding you, you’d slip in your blood and fall and he’d lean over and stab you repeatedly, your blood spurting out while you screamed. Then you’d die.

Jesus died in agony, hung from the cross, his flesh pierced by nails. The Jews’ fault: they betrayed him. Was my mother still a Jew underneath? Was I? In church every Sunday we prayed for the conversion of the Jews to the One True Faith, and celebrated the heroic martyrs who died defending it. The martyrs refused to marry pagans like Bluebeard.
The Lives of the Saints
listed the tortures: slashed with swords, breasts torn off, eyes gouged out, racked on the wheel, made to walk naked into brothels where soldiers waited for them. I wouldn’t be brave enough to stand up for what I knew was right. I’d turn pagan and marry Bluebeard rather than be hurt so much. Then after death I’d be punished and burn in hell for ever more. You could shut all this away inside the slammed covers of your book but at night the book jumped open and red fire swept out and consumed everything.

Madame Baudry shook off her daughter’s hand and tweaked her blue woollen gloves. She said to Marie-Angèle: you know, becoming a boarder costs a lot. It means behaving. Mind what I say!

Up until now Marie-Angèle had attended the state primary school, as I had. The nuns’ school was a private one. Madame Baudry’s pregnancy meant she became exhausted and could not cope, once my mother fell ill, and she had to do all her own washing as well as everything else. The nuns had agreed to take Marie-Angèle, like me, full-time for several weeks. Half rates for the Baudrys, because they were such good Catholics. I went free. Marie-Angèle had spelled it out: you’re a charity child, other people have to pay your fees. I retorted: but my father was an educated man. Unlike yours!

The convent had sent over a lay sister to help the Baudrys. When she arrived they put her in Marie-Angèle’s room. Supposing Madame Baudry died like the Mad Hermit’s wife? Supposing Maman died too? I hadn’t said a proper goodbye to her this morning. I wanted to run back home, not start living among strangers. Stop crying, Madame Baudry said: don’t be so naughty. I cried louder. Her face reddened and she slapped me. Her woollen blow didn’t hurt, but the shock of it did. Hot tears burst from my eyes and I bawled.

Marie-Angèle started crying too. It’s just as bad for me! That nun’s in my room! Madame Baudry cuffed her round the head. Stop this nonsense. You’ve got nothing to cry about. Jeanne lives in a hovel, her mother’s got to go to the paupers’ hospital. You should be setting a good example. I’m ashamed of you.

She seized my shoulder and shook me. D’you want me to tell your mother how you’re behaving, when she’s so ill? Do you? Do you? She’ll feel so upset. After all I’ve done for her, too. I don’t know why I bothered with that photograph. You don’t deserve it.

To mark the occasion of our becoming boarders, we had had our photograph taken outside the Baudrys’ shop. That’s nice for Jeanne, said Madame Baudry: people will see that someone cares about her. Monsieur Baudry took the picture. At nine years old, I was small and skinny, whereas Marie-Angèle was tall and well developed for her age.

I didn’t smile for the picture. I refused. Once in their school I wouldn’t smile at the nuns, either. You’re hard-faced, Mother Lucie used to scold me. Dressed in our regulation pale grey pinafores, our hair combed back, posed side by side as friends, Marie-Angèle and I were supposed to look as though we came from the same sort of background. Alike as two dried peas. But underneath we were different, as the nuns recognised perfectly well. On their wooden board, with its list of weekly tasks painted in black italic lettering, our names, written on bits of white card, slotted into different places. On Saturday I had to mop the corridors whereas Marie-Angèle only had to dust the statues in our classroom. She didn’t dare go into the larder in the convent-school kitchen, forage for leftovers. Always hungry, I stole food as a matter of course. My punishment, each time Mother Lucie found me out, was to clean the privies. These always stank because so many of us had to use them, and in such a hurry that there wasn’t time for the cisterns to refill, and they often blocked because we put too much paper down, wanting to veil the yellow water bobbing with the previous user’s business.

Sometimes I’d sit on the lavatory and read a square or two of newspaper before wiping myself with it. Marie-Angèle’s father handed on his newspapers to the nuns. Sitting on the wooden shelf, one hand hoisting up my overall, I learned new words. Words about Jews, which hopped across the pages like toads. I wanted to spring up and chase them away. In the school we had silver-fish in the lavatories, and woodlice, and bluebottles, and ants. You had to squash them. Outside, on the garden paths, slugs and snails lounged along. You were supposed to squash them too. The words in my brain could not be squashed. They wriggled and squelched and inched back and forth.

Marie-Angèle said I might know lots of words but I was still a baby. I was afraid of the dark, and sometimes at night I wet the bed. Washerwoman’s daughter pissing in the wrong place. All that gave me grace in her eyes was my capacity to tell her the stories I culled from her book of fairy tales. Reading bored her. She preferred listening to my oral versions. Chewing a fingernail. Sucking a strand of hair. The bloodthirstier the stories the better.

Now from the end of the bench in the schoolroom she hissed at me.

You’re pathetic. First of all you dare us to do something and then you get cold feet. Are we going upstairs or aren’t we?

She stood up, in front of the estrade and the blackboard, put her hands on her hips, stared at me contemptuously. She looked so exactly like a little woman that I wanted to laugh. She wasn’t a child at all. You could see what she’d look like at forty. Her plump little face, with its apple-pip eyes, its tight mouth, wouldn’t change. She was already complete and grown-up.

I didn’t want her to leave me on my own in the downstairs classroom, too close to the front door on which passing tramps sometimes banged for food. If I opened the door to them, what would happen? They’d kidnap me I’d run away with them they might try to marry me I’d never see Maman again.

All right, I said: let’s go.

As part of the dare, more chance of getting caught, we went up by the main stairs. This staircase wound about the great well in the centre of the school. It rose through layers of classrooms and dormitories, networks of corridors. The wide wooden treads gleamed, bare and highly polished. During the week, at recreation time, when the bell clanged, a flood of overalled girls would swirl down it, pour out into the school yard. Now only we two remained in the house.

No windows: we climbed up in semi-darkness. On the second half-landing stood a statue of Our Lady of The Seven Sorrows, her colander heart pierced by seven swords, all the love once in it leaked out like whey. A red gleam came from the votive lamp in front of her. I lifted my feet with caution: too much space around me. Not yet dusk: going upstairs in this half-dimness was more bearable than at night, when I stepped towards bad dreams. Dead mothers waited for me at the far end of the corridor with cobweb mantillas over their faces. They’d pushed up their tomb-stones and escaped. They were lonely in their graves, and so they’d come to the school to fetch some children to play with. They’d pull our bones about then eat us.