Shhh (7 page)

These old rags, these documents and these photos, that's all that was left of my family. My inheritance.

I sat on the floor and one by one I took out the old papers and photographs from that box. Most of the papers were in such bad condition they were falling apart. The one thing I did find that was still in good condition was a
livret de la caisse d'épargne de Montrouge
made out to me.

I'll tell later how I got this saving's account booklet, and how I succeeded in collecting the money. It's a very funny story. But first ...

Do you know Federman what you should do before going on? You should make a list of all the stories you promised to tell us. This way, you won't forget.

Good idea. A list like that will wet the potential readers' mouths, if I may allow myself a liquid metaphor, and this way they'll want to continue reading. It will keep them in suspense.

Okay, I'll make a list of these stories before revealing what I found in that box in the bedroom closet that convinced me that my father was probably unfaithful.

List of scenes of my childhood to be written.

1. Scene describing how my uncle Leon planted a tree in the courtyard of our building.

2. Scene describing the savings account booklet I found in the box in the small closet, and how I succeeded in collecting the money when I returned to France for the first time, after ten years in America.

3. Scene describing how I once stole a ring in a department store.

4. Scene describing how after school with the other boys from our neighborhood we played soccer in the street, not with a soccer ball, but with a little wooden palette that would demolish our shoes, which made my mother very unhappy because she could not afford to buy me new shoes. In fact, concerning shoes, I had to wait until my cousin Salomon's shoes became too small for him, to be handed down to me by my aunt Marie. But these used shoes were already too small for me because, even though I was younger than my cousin Salomon, my feet were bigger than his. I suppose, there is nothing much more that can be said about that.

5. Scene describing how mean one of the teachers in school had been, and how he would throw a metal ruler at us if we spoke in class, and how when he came back from the war he had lost a leg, and he was not as mean, and how we would laugh when we saw him walk with only one leg and his crutches. We would call him
le boiteux.

6. Scene describing how one day when I went to my cousin Salomon, to ask him to help me with my algebra homework, he tried to force me to suck his cock.

7. Scene describing how, one day, when I was playing doctor with my sister Jacqueline, we almost got caught by my mother. It was the day war was declared.

8. Scene describing how my cousin Salomon, one day, when we were playing in the street in front of our house, tied me with a rope down in a ditch some workers had dug in the street, and how he shoved a handkerchief in my mouth so I couldn't shout, and how I couldn't untie myself and answer my mother when she called out from the window of our apartment for me to come home because it was starting to get dark.

9. Scene describing the Exodus at the beginning of the war, and how all the people left Paris as the German soldiers approached the city, and how my parents and sisters and me, we walked carrying suitcases on the roads of Normandy with thousands of other people, and how we saw French soldiers in retreat, and also how we saw dead people when the enemy airplanes fired at us with machine guns.

10. Scene describing how we wandered for days on the roads of Normandy, and how when we arrived in Argentan the Germans were already there, and how I was impressed with their uniforms, especially the officers' uniforms.

11. Scene describing the house in Argentan in which the Germans put us, and where we stayed for almost a year, and how my mother would fix the German soldier's uniforms, do their laundry, press their shirts, and how my father would get stuff from the black market for the German soldiers, and how they would bring us food, and how in the evening German soldiers came to our house to discuss politics with my father, and how I would go to the store to buy bottles of beer for the German soldiers, and how before leaving late in the evening, they would all raise their left fist and together with my father they would sing the International, and me too, I would sing with them in a soft voice. The German soldiers who came to our house were all Communists, like my father. My father explained to me that the best place for German Communists to hide was in the army.

12. Scene demonstrating how verisimilitude often becomes improbable when one tells a story.

13. Scene describing the Argentan
Lycée
where I got my
certificat d'études,
and how the boys used to fight with chestnuts that fell from the trees that surrounded the school playground, and how I would also throw chestnuts at them.

14. Scene describing how, during the very cold winter we spent in Argentan, one day the German soldiers who came to discuss politics with my father unloaded a whole truck of coal in front of our house, and how all the neighbors were saying that we were collaborators.

15. Scene describing how the children in Argentan played on the big square in front of the church where the Germans had piled up the gas masks and the rifles and the helmets abandoned by the retreating French army.

16. Explain how, when the war started, all the people in the cities had to carry a gas mask everywhere they went. Even the children.

17. Scene describing the night when the tannery in front of our house caught fire, and how all the people in our street had to be evacuated, and how the firemen fought the fire, and how I wished our house would also burn so we could move away from this neighborhood.

18. Describe how, after the burnt factory had been completely demolished, we had a view of the whole city from the window of our apartment on the third floor.

19. Describe the wasteland—
La Zone,
as it was called—between Porte D'Orléans and Montrouge, and how the Arabs from the colonies, we called them
Les Sidis,
slept in this no-man's land in cardboard boxes or wrapped in newspapers, and how the people who had to cross the Zone to get home were scared of them.

20. Scene revealing how I masturbated in my bed or in the hot house in the courtyard, and how once my mother caught me doing it, and told me that if I continued to do that I would become blind.

21. Scene describing how at the beginning of the war, before the Germans arrived in Paris, during a bombardment alert, my father and I stood at the open window of our apartment to watch the German planes bombard the Renault factory in Malakoff. It was like the fireworks on Bastille day. My mother, before going down to the shelter with my sisters, and the other people in the building, shouted at my father to go down to the shelter, but my father refused, and I was proud to stay with him during the entire alert.

22. Describe how on Sunday, my mother, my sisters, and I would walk from Montrouge all the way to Rue Vercingétorix in the 14
^th
arrondissement, to have lunch at my grandmother's with the aunts, uncles, and cousins, and how my sisters and I always complained that it was too far to go, and that we should take the subway or the autobus, because our feet hurt, and how my mother would tell us we could not afford the metro or the autobus, and how my father never came with us on Sunday because everybody in my mother's side of the family hated him.

23. Tell how when we walked home to Montrouge after the visit to my grandmother's, we always went before it was dark because we were afraid of the
Sidis
in the Zone.

24. Tell how, when I was old enough to take the subway alone to go visit my aunts on my father's side and play with their children who lived in the Jewish neighborhood of Le Marais, I would make a detour to Rue St. Denis to look at the prostitutes standing in the street.

25. Tell how I always dreamt of becoming a great adventurer. An explorer. Or else a stowaway on a pirate ship. I also dreamt of being able to fly.

26. Tell how once my mother bought me un éclair au chocolat for my birthday.

27. Tell how I liked to go to the open market with my mother to do the food shopping.

28. Describe how the man who delivered the coal for the building where we lived dropped it from his truck in the street, and how my uncle Leon would make me carry it to the cellar with a big pail.

29. Describe how I would sneak into the Montrouge cinema, Place de la République, to see the Charlie Chaplin movies.

30. Describe how Yvette, the pretty young woman who lived on the same floor we did, one day asked me, when I was only eight years old, to come to her place to show me how to make myself feel good.

31. Tell about the stolen spoon.

32. Describe how my father used to take me with him to Place de la Bastille to demonstrate with the Communists against the government, and how we all sang the International, and how one day the police dispersed us by striking us with their sticks, and how my father got hit on the head and was bleeding, and how he wiped the blood with my handkerchief, and how my mother screamed when she saw the blood on my handkerchief, and how she told my father that he should never take me again, that he was trying to have me killed, and how I loved those demonstrations.

33. Describe how one day my father packed his little Polish suitcase and said he was going to Spain to fight with the republicans against Franco, and when my mother started crying and screaming my father screamed even louder than her, and how we the children were so scared because they were screaming so loud, we hid in the kitchen, and how when my aunt Marie heard the screaming she came up to our apartment to see what was going on, and when my mother explained while still sobbing that my father wanted to go to Spain to fight against Franco, my aunt Marie started screaming at my father that he was a
salopard,
that he had no right to abandon his wife and children, that he was a stupid Communist, and that he would die before reaching Spain because of his tuberculosis, and how my father threw his little Polish suitcase against the wall and walked out of our apartment slamming the door and cursing aunt Marie, and we even heard him arguing with my uncle Leon in the staircase, and how my father finally came home three days later, and nobody ever talked about that scene again.

Well, good enough. I'll stop this list here. I'm sure there'll be other scenes to describe. But perhaps I've already said enough about some of these, I won't have to say more.

Federman, that would be a good place for you to tell the story of the savings account booklet.

Yes, why not, even though the funny part happened after my childhood.

At the end of each school year prizes were distributed. I don't recall how old I was, but one year I won the first prize. I don't know if it was because of the good work I had done or if it was just for my good behavior. In class, I always conducted myself well. I didn't talk with the other boys, I listened to the teacher attentively when she gave us dictations. I always turned my homework in on time. And above all I learned by heart all the poems we had to recite in class. I loved poetry.

I still remember some of these poems I had to memorize in school. Sometimes I recite to myself these crumbs of poetry.

There was one poem that I particularly liked, and that I still recite sometimes. Well, the few lines that I remember. It's a poem by Victor Hugo called “Oceano Nox.”

I liked the title even though I didn't know what it meant before the teacher explained it to the class.

Here are some of the lines I remember. I quote them in French since I memorized them in French.

Oh! Combien de marins, combien capitaines
Qui sont partis joyeux pour des courses lointaines,
Dans ce morne horizon se sont évanouis!
Combien ont disparu, dure et triste fortune!
Dans une mer sans fond, par une nuit sans lune,
Sous l'aveugle océan à jamais enfouis!

I suppose I should attempt to translate that for those readers who may not know French. But I won't bother with the rhymes.

Oh, how many sailors, how many captains
Who left joyfully for far away places
Have vanished beyond the bleak horizon!
How many have disappeared, hard and sad destiny,
In a bottomless sea, during a moonless night
Buried forever under the blind ocean

That's the best I can do for now. Ah, Victor Hugo,
hélas!

I have forgotten the rest of the poem, except for two more lines.

On s'entretient de vous parfois dans les veillées,
Tandis que vous dormez dans les goémons verts!

I loved that word
goémons,
even though I never knew what a
goémon
was. In fact, I had to look it up in my French-English dictionary in order to be able to translate it.

Sometimes during evening gatherings we speak of you
While you are asleep amongst the green seaweed.

That's good enough.

Back then, as a boy, I wanted to be a sailor who would sail joyfully to far away places. A deck-boy on a big ship. Perhaps even on a pirate ship.

To fall asleep amidst the green seaweeds.

Here I am, again entangled in a dreamy digression.

I was saying in school I always did my work well. Perhaps I was not as dumb as I was made to believe, even if my uncle Leon and my cousin Salomon always called me
petit con
because I never had much to say.

Often at the end of the school week I would come home with
bons points.
In my school you would get
bons points
for good behavior. They looked like little stickers.

They had no value, except that they made my mother happy when I brought them home. And me, I was proud to get these
bons points.
I kept them in a small box.

As I said, it was probably more for good behavior than for my good grades that I was awarded the first prize that year. Good behavior in my school counted more than good work.