Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (7 page)

“Doo uu speek Inglish?” they squeal as they dart up to us and then dash away.

Perhaps because I am his ally in this new place, because we are both foreigners, David, despite the swift kick, confesses to a crush on me. I find it hard to believe my remarkable luck in this regard, but it is true. We have passed notes
on the bus during school outings, admitting to a love that, measured by a grading system borrowed from our teachers, reaches a full 19
½
out of 20. This declaration made, we are unsure what comes next, and excitedly circle each other without ever taking any action.

Improbably, David is Jewish. I say improbably because, in these Parisian days, I know few Jews personally, and David’s blond hair and happy manner are utterly unlike the other Jews I do know, the ones in the pictures they show us at school. They are emaciated, living skeletons in striped pyjamas, indistinguishable one from the other.

“Have you seen Delvaux’s horror show?”

“Has Delvaux showed you his dirty pictures yet?”

Every year in September, as the younger students are still nervously assessing their new teachers, the older ones sneeringly ask these questions. It is Monsieur Delvaux, our history teacher, who early in the fall term will set up the school’s single, wheezing slide projector, draw the dusty roller blinds down over the windows, issue a warning to the weak of stomach that they should leave the room and devote a class to the lesson of the Holocaust. In the dim light created by the projector’s bulb and the few rays leaking through the blinds, he dwells on the atrocities at length, and watches our faces closely, hoping to shock his charges as much as he wants to educate them. Men and women rounded up into cattle cars. Gas chambers disguised as showers. Lampshades made of human skin. He longs to disturb the bland surfaces of our unmarked faces, to add some small measure of horror, fear, or perhaps simply doubt to our cossetted lives. M. Delvaux was born at the end of the war—he seems to regret that he was not personally present for its events—but his father, he says, was in the Resistance. The older children
have heard his stories many times, and hoot with laughter when we younger ones earnestly inform them that M. Delvaux’s father fought the Nazis.

These stories are not new to me either. Indeed, I cannot remember ever not knowing the fate of six million European Jews. Her brief words clipped by embarrassment, my mother has told me that I will bleed every month, that babies are made by the union of an egg and a sperm, and that there are other things I will learn when I am older, but she has dwelt with firm patience on the lessons of history. She and my father were teenagers when the war ended and the unspeakable news came out of Europe. In the sixties, as the world did begin, slowly at first but with increasing desperation, to discuss the stories of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz, they were new parents doting on their new baby, their first and only child. My mother expresses her daily anxieties—what if the gas leaks? what if you catch cold? what if your father is late? what if the franc falls? what if the Socialists win the election?—with cramped tones and furrowed brow. Only when giving voice to the greatest fear of all does she become large and gracious: “It must never happen again.”

At the dinner table, my parents are instantly, unspokenly alarmed when I tell them of the slide show in Delvaux’s history class. They can catch a whiff of prurience a mile away, for it is the very odour they are most anxious should not attach itself to their gentle attempts to share the greatest horror of the adult world with their twelve-year-old daughter. There is a lengthy pause, and I sense, too late, that I have stumbled across taboo. My father speaks.

“Were you frightened by the pictures?”

“Oh, no, Papa. I wasn’t frightened.”

No, I am not frightened, but rather awed by the great weight of history that has carried these people away. I feel small and inadequate in my security, and sure no such powerful event could ever mark my life. These suffering skeletons in their striped pyjamas seem to me as noble and as distant as the bleeding Christ and weeping Virgin whose image hangs on the wall of the small classroom where we dully receive instruction in our catechism every Wednesday afternoon.

David, of course, is exempt from catechism class, and may spend his Wednesdays as he pleases. This freedom only enhances the aura of easy good fortune that seems to surround him. I long for David; I long to be David, to be that lucky, that blond.

Yet, for all his happiness and health, David too makes some claim to the special status of historic victim. He has told a circle of breathless French schoolgirls that David Smith—that bland, Anglo-Saxon label he bears—is not his real name. His real name is David Aaron Goldberg, but his parents changed it when they moved here, to his mother’s homeland, fearing that anti-Semitism would impede his father’s progress in the world of European business. The other girls are deeply impressed. An exotic name change beats Philippe’s recent holiday in Martinique and Bernard’s dark eyes. “People are stupid, you know,” David says, and they all nod wisely. “Oh yes. Your father was right to be careful,” says one. But I am not sure whether to believe David.

Certainly, he has a mischievous streak, and often urges me to cut catechism class to join him on a Wednesday afternoon. When I do so, it is within the safety of the group. Our ringleader Sylvie has decided we shall all skip class and head for the Métro.

At the top of the Champs-Elysées, underneath the triumphal arch at the Place Charles de Gaulle, three lines of the Paris Métro intersect. The result is a labyrinth of connecting corridors that schoolchildren have discovered is ideally suited to tag. As you tear down the hallway leading towards the platform
Direction Porte Dauphine
, you can vaguely hear pounding feet and joyful cries below you in some other corridor. On the orange-tiled platform
Direction Nation
, where the train reaches a terminus before starting back down towards the Left Bank, it disgorges passengers onto the right track before opening doors to receive new ones from the left. If you time your arrival carefully enough, you can elude a pursuer by running right through a car during the few moments when the doors are open on both sides. Even better if he manages to get onto the train only to have the exit doors across from him slam in his face. Turning to go back the way he has come, he will find those doors closing too, and while his prey laughs delightedly in the background, he will be carried down the line to the next stop, Kléber.

I have pulled off that trick on at least one occasion, but David is no fool and times his quick passage through the doors correctly, catching up with me on the other side. He tags me with a hand on my arm and keeps hold of me, panting heavily with the exertion of the game and unsure what to do with his prize.

Sylvie, the instigator of the afternoon’s activities, rounds a corner from the other direction, calling my name in French:
“Marie, Marie.”

I am Marie, after my grandmothers—Mary, a shrunken little Englishwoman hidden away in an old-age home in Liverpool, and Marie, an elegant Quebec dowager retired to a cottage on the shores of a Laurentide lake. Marie is just
French for Mary, the Virgin’s name, a plain enough label in English, slightly prettified by its rendition in French as
marie
. But say it in English—mu-ree—and it’s a silly, pretentious little name that makes me think of the tunes from American musicals that my father whistles, or of a bleach-blonde hairdresser in a Liverpool beauty shop I once visited, under protest, with my mother. I am
Marie
, but would rather not be Marie.

My father’s family sailed to Canada from Normandy in 1690, at least that is what
Grand-mère
says. My father reversed the voyage in 1960, making a young Quebecker’s pilgrimage to the motherland and stopping in Paris. He met my mother in a gallery of medieval ivories at the Louvre, and fell in love with a hesitant young Englishwoman who spoke bad French and worked as a nanny for a Parisian family. They were married within a year, and stayed in Paris, partly out of romanticism and partly as the first of my father’s many concessions to my mother’s desires. She wanted to remain close to her family in England, and so they compromised on France: his language, her side of the Atlantic.

At home, the three of us speak together in English. My mother trips along in the proper middle-class accent she was taught in her Catholic day school; my father offers a flawless version of the flat North American tones he learned from
les Anglais
of his youth in Montreal. My accent hovers in between. My mother calls it mid-Atlantic and I have an image of a rocky island somewhere west of Britain filled with people who speak English the way I do. In French there is no choice. The soft, sweet drawl of my father’s Canadian tongue is an impossibility. I speak as my Parisian classmates do, with unctuous u’s, rolled r’s and
t’s
spat out like orange pits.

We live in France like permanent tourists, forever visiting, noting and distinguishing, savouring the culture yet holding ourselves aloof. “In England…” my mother will begin, as she remarks on a difference in custom or habit—the hour at which people eat or the age at which they marry. “Now, there’s something you’d never see in Canada,” my father will pronounce at the sight of everything from a Gothic cathedral to a boy pissing in the street. Our weekends and holidays are filled with museums, churches, and castles, as though perhaps our stay in this fascinating place would not last forever. My father sells antiques; my mother practises self-improvement; all three of us, we believe in art.

And so it is that a hundred French villages will live forever in my mind’s eye. Shaded avenues, stone facades, winding streets, giddy spires, northern walls, southern roofs. The wind blows across a beach in Brittany; the sun warms a roof garden in Provence. Some I can name—Etretat, Bergerac, Vaucluse—but others bear the faintest identities, hardly distinguishable from dreams. There is a place along a riverbank, a few urban streets quickly giving way to small country houses with gardens opening onto the towpath. Men fish, my parents walk ahead of me along the river. Have I visited this place or dreamt it? Was it the destination of a weekend outing or has my imagination given three-dimensional life to a scene painted by Seurat or Monet that I must have seen in a museum? I cannot tell, but cherish its vague outlines, knowing there must be some reason they dwell with me.

A hundred French villages live in my mind’s eye, but I know only one place in Canada: the cottage. Every other summer, my mother packs huge suitcases, fussing about swimsuits, rain gear, and warm sweaters, while my father struts about the apartment beaming, showing me plane
tickets and passports, checking the progress of our preparations. We fly to Montreal, a city that flickers large and sprawling beneath the descending plane but on the ground never proves to be anything more than an airport and circling highways. We soon leave it behind because, despite the long flight, my father is impatient to keep going. He rents a car and drives us northward.

It is always dark when we arrive, alighting in a deep blackness that silences you so thoroughly you can hear the rustle of trees and the sound of waves. I would pause to savour this new yet familiar place where the scent of pine, air, and water hints at a great wildness that might yet be glimpsed if I could wait long enough for my eyes to grow accustomed to the night.

But my parents have no reason to dally. They hustle forward, anxious to announce their appearance, seeking the warmth and babble of the cottage kitchen with its big stone hearth. The generous room smells of woodsmoke and is filled with the kissing and chattering of uncles, aunts, and cousins. We exchange greetings, unpack gifts, relate our travels, and made hungry by the excitement of arrival, we eat bread and cheese washed down with black tea, talking until exhaustion overtakes us. A long night ends on a narrow bunk in the dormitory behind the kitchen, warmed by the backside of the same stone hearth, and there begins a languorous summer of breakfast in blue jeans before the dew has evaporated, warm swims at noon under big, blue skies, berry picking on scorching afternoons when the heat bugs sing, and gentle evening canoe rides past the large, lurching pine that marks the edge of our bay.

My cousins laugh at my French vocabulary—
cuisinière
for
poêle, shopping
for
magasiner
—and when it comes to
English, mimic my trans-Atlantic accent, but they are happy to include me in their games. They speak largely in French, with English, the language of the schoolyard and the street, thrown in for bravado. We devote a whole summer to paper dolls, a swimming contest—who can make it into the lake every day no matter how cold the water—tag, kick the can, or skipping rope. We teach each other our rhymes.

“Am
stram gram, pic et pic et colégram, bourre et bourre et ratatam, am stram gram pic dam.”

“Engine, engine number nine, going down Chicago line… And you are not it.”

“Ne pleure pas, Jeannette, Alazim boum boum, alazim boum boum, ne pleure pas, Jeannette, nous te marierons… avec le fils d’un prince ou celui d’un baron…”

“Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief.”

Jocelyne, the eldest of my cousins, always treads on the bright-pink rubber rope on “rich man” or, failing that, “doctor” or “lawyer.” She already knows these are the professions of wealth, and slow moving with a burgeoning plumpness, she will purposely let the boys catch up with her when we play tag with the neighbours. I love Lisette, her younger sister, better. Wiry but awkward, she will step on the rope unpredictably.

“A tinker, Lisette, a tinker. You’re going to marry a tinker.” We have no idea what a tinker might be, but sense the small, cramped English word promises little.

I am long-legged and strong-limbed and can skip rope forever, never missing a beat, exhausting my cousins’ arms.

“Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer,
Indian chief, tinkertailorsoldiersailor…
Tu ne te marieras pas, Marie
. You won’t have a husband, you won’t have a husband.” I just laugh, secure in my strong legs that can always evade the rope and carry me out of reach of the boys next door.