Planus (19 page)

I opened the cumbersome box of pastries, buckled by the rain but not too badly damaged, full of jam tarts, cream puffs, meringues, millefeuilles, cakes filled with chocolate or sprinkled with almonds, angelica, glace cherries, cinnamon or vanilla, and powdered with icing-sugar, rum babas, maids of honour. ... I had rifled the whole shop and they were good Parisian pastries! But the kids did not touch them. They had never seen such things. They did not know what they were. In the same way, the display of toys was just too much for them, too overwhelming, not to say terrifying. Tontje kicked the toys surreptitiously. Flip, who had been whimpering all this time, suddenly started to bawl, and Fons and Peer followed suit, letting out the most heart-rending sobs. I did not know what to do. Even little Sjanke, whom Jantje had laid in his cradle so as to give his attention to the toys, began to cry for his dummy with all his might. The water in the cauldron suddenly boiled over and the escaping steam damped and tarnished the brilliant plumage and delicate wings of the tropical birds. Only Guust slept peacefully in his crate, cuddling a Japanese doll. Jantje, the eldest, took up a threatening stance, he clenched his fists and I really believe he would have attacked me, ordering me to pack up 'all this gimcrack rubbish', if, just at the moment when the exasperated child was about to spring at me, the door had not opened and Peter Van der Keer said to me : 'Let's piss off. Are you ready?'

I went out.

In the yard, just as I was about to start running after Peter, who had already reached the rough road at the end of the stockade, I was struck and whirled about like a top, but it was not the hurricane, it was an onomatopoeia of wails, imprecations, shrill cries and protests gushing out of the little farmhouse as if a pig was having its throat cut right there in the kitchen.

'What's happening?' I asked Peter when I had caught up with my companion.

'My sister's in labour. It's ghastly, dreadful . . . you can't imagine.'

We ran away like a couple of thieves.

Once we were seated in the tram that would take us back to the town, my friend went on: '. . . You can't imagine . . . Will . . . yes, that's Hanna's husband . . . he's a brute ... no imagination . . . insensitive ... he has no idea how to ease my sister's suffering.

. . . He stood there . . . just looking on ... he told me he was used to it . . . that she would get over it . . . that it was nothing. . . .'

Naturally, our cubicle was in the lowest salon, and I observed with great amusement the behaviour of the clients, who seemed to me peaceable enough, the men in their Sunday suits, the women decked out in their finery, all huge eaters, copious drinkers, sitting at table without speaking, only lifting their noses from their plates, with a visibly satisfied air, when they had sopped up the last drop of sauce with a piece of bread and folded their napkins. When it was our turn to be favoured by the orchestra, and the lift came to rest for a brief quarter of an hour on the ground floor (which was, nevertheless, longer than it condescended to stop on any of the other floors), these couples unselfconsciously stood up, all more or less of the same kidney, or, at least, all equally ponderous and dowdy, and started to dance in front of the honeycomb of partitions, gracelessly, without charm, lacking all sense of rhythm, responding only to the sensual languor of Argentinian tangos which are, after all, orchestrated and in counterpoint, as is the music of Bach, and accelerate like the serpentine line of three or four interwoven fugues
glissando,
and I was hard put to it not to laugh at these dumplings of men and at these slow, sentimental women abandoning themselves in the arms of their clod-hopping cavaliers who, when the orchestra disappeared through the trap-door in the ceiling, escorted their partners back to their places at table (where a new cover had been laid while the bemused dancers stretched their legs), sat down again without a word, without any effusion or show of feeling, and fell to eating and drinking once more — there was a lavish menu for Christmas Eve! — their stomachs easy, their belts let out one notch, napkins tucked under their chins, forks grasped in their fists, and, in view of this manifest absence of passion, this general passivity, I wondered whether my friend Van der Keer had not exaggerated when speaking of a possible brawl, the traditional brawl, the great Christmas brawl, and had even recommended my packing a revolver in my pocket (which, naturally, I had not done, as we were supposed to spend the evening with his sister and celebrate Christmas Eve quietly with the children). The brawl broke out as suddenly as a clap of thunder and unleashed itself with such brutality in this atmosphere of phoney luxury and genuine bonhomie that the fashionable restaurant was half-demolished in the twinkling of an eye; outside, there were dead and wounded lying in the streets, and we had to fight, to batter our way out for several hours, before we could regain the ship. And what a set-to it was, and how joyfully we battled! For myself, I adored a free-for-all and liked to fight at the time (I was young, it was 1911 and I was twenty-four years old), and Peter had been infuriated by the visit to his sister's and was longing to demonstrate his revolt against the injustices of life, at any cost and in any fashion whatsoever! When we finally reached the ship, Peter was sent off to the hospital with both his fists sprained, if not dislocated or broken, from hitting so hard (he would not have been able to hold his pen, and so was unfit to carry out his duties as ship's writer). Three weeks later, when I disembarked in New York, my head was still swollen, swathed in a bandage that made me look like that astounding head of
Je Sais Tout,
the precursor of
Bibendum or Bebe Cadum
in the family of macrocephalics; when they at last removed this absurd upholstery, my mug was seamed with scars, including a deep one that still marks my upper lip and makes me laugh when I look at myself in the mirror and remember how I charged, head down, at all those stolid Dutchmen in the Jordaan, forging a path for myself to get back to the
Volturno,
that accursed cargo-boat on which I knocked about the world for such a long time before dumping my bag on dry land in New York.

The hardest task was to conquer the access to a footbridge that led to one of the dock-gates, on the far side of a canal, where the battle was particularly bloody, and I fear we would never have succeeded in reaching it, now that the melee had become inextricable and degenerated into real slaughter, if, all at once, a piano had not fallen in our midst, dropping from a third-floor window and ploughing an empty space, which Peter and I were quick to profit by. We reached that confounded footbridge over the canal and scaled the dock-gates, which were locked of course, followed by a gang of lascars who ran after us although they did not belong to our ship. The boat was on the point of sailing, so we must have been fighting for more than three hours. As usual, the police and Customs officers had gone to earth.

I have already said that Peter was evacuated to the hospital, along with some other more or less seriously wounded fellows. I never saw Peter Van der Keer again. So I cannot say how this affair turned out for my pal, nor how it ended for the others and what was the definitive, stupid and futile balance-sheet. It was the fiercest brawl I had ever been involved in. A windy corner. One forgets everything, but what I shall never forget is that piano shattering to the ground from the third floor. A thousand tom-cats miaowing and making love on the tiles at night, or a thousand she-cats on heat dancing their saraband among the gargoyles on the facade of a cathedral, are as nothing and of no account compared to a piano, with all its chords breaking at once and the belly of the sound-box bursting, and the caterwauling
in arpeggio
of all the notes from flat to sharp and sharp to flat. It is as deafening as the
Boom!
of a cannon, but exactly the opposite because, when all is said and done, the explosion of a piano is still written in a harmonic scale.

I spoke of a carnival. It was that all right. I often yearn to hear that providential piano again. But who, amongst the most famous virtuosi, could one invite to make that bugger of a pianoforte sound and resound? Rubinstein is the only man I can believe capable of improvising on that instrument fallen from the skies, Arthur Rubinstein, indefatigable globe-trotter, who has toured the world several times with his piano, like the
Traveller and His Shadow,
and who spreads joy wherever he goes, in the drawing- rooms of bankers' homes, at the court of Spain, at the Vatican, in an aeroplane, on board scudding packet-boats, in the glacial concert- halls where he unleashes a Dionysiac enthusiasm or delirium, my good friend, Artur Rubinstein, the
bon vivant,
or perhaps Oscar, the human cannon-ball at Luna Park, if he is a pianist, for he is an athlete and is accustomed to falling from the skies; or that charlatan, the pianist Savinio.  (
To Cousin Blaise

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his corresponding number whom he has never seen, the other Cousin Blaise (of Provence)
SHOCK AND COUNTER-SHOCK

"Your friends, the English, are really giving the Jerries a pasting!5  said the
patron
of the Restaurant de l'Opera as I was sitting down to the famous 'round table' in his kitchen, where, for four years, up until the Liberation, I took all my meals, and where, in spite of rationing and restrictions, there was a constant procession of gastronomic delights, great and small, the patron having been the King of Sweden's favourite chef, at the time when Gustav V stayed in Menton and came down to the Ermitage every day to enjoy the fish that Felicien cooked so marvellously and of which the King was inordinately fond.

'A fellow came in here for breakfast this morning and he'll be back for lunch; he's on Service de Travail Obligatoire or something, on the run, on leave, convalescing, God knows what, but he's just arrived from Germany and you should hear what he has to say about the air raids ! Talk to him, get him to tell you about it. It seems there were over two hundred thousand dead the other day in Hamburg.'

'Two hundred thousand? He's exaggerating.'

'No, I assure you, that's what the lad said. He's a railwayman. An engine-driver. His train couldn't get through, so he got out and took cover. He was there all through the bombing. The whole city was in flames. The port of Hamburg is destroyed. He took advantage of the confusion to do a bunk. He doesn't seem like a liar. On the contrary, he was looking for someone who could put him in the picture here as he wants to join the maquis. He doesn't want to go back to Germany. He's had enough, and he knows the Jerries are done for. He says they've had it. Every night the British planes come over and they're destroying the towns one after another. He saw nothing but ruins an,d rubble in every place he passed through.' ' Good. Lay another place beside mine and ask Renee to tell him come to my table, we'll see what sort of bloke he is.

What's on the menu today?'

'It's a bit meagre today, I'm afraid. I've got some
fricandeaux.'
'Ugh!' I said, 'I don't like them. If only you could still make them la grecque, swimming in olive oil, with a spicy stuffing of pepper-corns and Corinth grapes and capers! Anyway I loathe the skin. In

Greece they roll them up in vine-leaves with 'aromatic spices, bay- leaf and raisins. Are your
fricandeaux
made of meat or fish?'

'Alas, Monsieur Cendrars! You know we can't get fish any more.'

'As if there were no more fish in the Mediterranean!'

Extraordinary times we lived in ! One risked a fine or even imprisonment for eating an extra slice of bread, or steak on a meatless day. Three times a day Vichy radio brainwashed the French people, persuading them to eat soya beans, like Chinese coolies. Broadcasts from London, New York or Paris praised synthetic goods and chemical by-products to the skies and inundated listeners with statistics and the mathematics of calories. Some bright spark from Chicago claimed that the grass of the Prairies was rich in vitamins, and recommended all the peoples of the democracies to go out and graze on it, while, somewhere in Hungary, a villager was condemned to death for growing roses in his garden instead of the rutabaga and cabbages ordered by the local authorities! This was the point of stupidity we had reached in this modern world, run by men wise in the ways of war, where even the neutral countries were impressed by all this propaganda. Meanwhile, the Boches were filling their fat guts in France, guzzling our fine
cuisine,
drinking our wines, flourishing. It was the end of July 1943. I was not too sure how the war was going; there was not much hope left, except for the Russians. Since the Germans had invaded the southern zone, that is to say, since the preceding November when they occupied Aix-en-Provence, I had been eating only once a day, not so much because of the general scarcity and poverty, but because > I was not keen on showing my face too often in the street. However, although I ate only once a day, I made a point of insisting that the food was good, not only out of a spirit of contrariness, a taste for good food, and in order to hold my head up and endure to the bitter end, but also for the sake of maintaining an essential tradition, and far from complaining about having such a difficult client to satisfy, the
patron
of the Opera was delighted by my steadfastness, for he was disgusted by the pot-luck he was forced to serve to his clientele of students, clerks and shopgirls, who had very little money, and Felicien made superhuman efforts to feed them honestly in spite of penury, idiotic restrictions, cretinous police surveillance and the astronomic prices on the black market since June 1940, when he had been evacuated from Menton, 'after the Italians stabbed us in the back'. Felicien had lost everything — house, furniture, crockery, pots and pans, clothing, linen, his fishing-boat (Felicien was a passionate fisherman!), his breeding-tanks full of live lobsters and his exalted position as chef at the palace of the Ermi- ge. With his wife and child he had taken refuge in Aix and opened is restaurant, and now he was slaving himself to death over his ens in an effort to provide decent meals, and he succeeded, by dint of hard work, artfulness, devotion, by taking serious and unwarranted risks, and also out of love, not for his stingy and ungrate- 1 customers, but for the art of cooking itself, and so as not to lose is reputation as an incomparable chef. I was very fond of Felicien. He was a good Frenchman. His youth had not been easy and he had ad to make shift as best he could to learn his art and make a position for himself. So it happened that he had travelled as far afield the China seas on board ocean-going liners, and he and I had plenty of memories in common, of the ports of call in the East and ;the Far East, Djibouti, Ceylon, Shanghai, Yokohama, and belly-dancers, nautch-girls, flower-boats, geishas. We had both been young , then and had knocked about the world at the same period, enjoying Our initiation, tasting and marvelling at everything. We might even, although we never did, have bumped into each other. His father 7 had thrown him out of the house at the age of ten and I had run \ away from home at the age of seventeen; he reached Japan by the south route and I arrived in China from the north, and the two of lis, like a couple of rolling stones, had wandered through more or less the same latitudes, he learning his profession and I, a lost soul, earning a living in high places and in low, including a plunge into the basement of the Hotel des Wagons-Lits, in Peking, in the winter of 1904. We had both started at the same level, from scratch . . . and we had both known what it was to be hungry.