Shhh (2 page)

And it is true that the ten years that followed my stay in the closet were years of silence and solitude.

Silence and solitude during the three miserable years I spent slaving on a farm in Southern France during the German occupation. I told all that in
Return to Manure.

And again in silence and solitude in America—no, in loneliness, which is worse than solitude—during the first years of my exile when my native tongue was slowly fading in me, while another strange tongue was painfully taking shape in my mouth.

I once wrote a poem about this exile into silence and solitude.

I told about that exile in America in
Double or Nothing
and
Take It or Leave It.
No need to repeat all that. It's what happened before the closet that I want to relate now.

That
shhh
was not my mother's last word. It was the first word of the book my mother knew I would write some day. Yes, my mother knew who I was and what I would become.

But she also knew that before arriving where I was supposed to go, before arriving at the book, I would have to endure much, suffer much, even if I did not understand why.

That is why, after my mother closed the door on me, I heard her sob quietly.

What name to give to that terrible moment? Was it a day of separation? A day of birth? A day of salvation? Or should it be called the beginning of a long absence from myself?

That day, in the dark, I became a mythical being, like Orpheus. Not the Orpheus who sang love songs in the tunnel of death, but an Orpheus who succeeded in pulling himself out of the stone block in which he was buried alive. Later, when I came out of that hole, as I was descending the stairs on tip toes, I understood that if I turned around something inexpressible would happen. My excess of life would be unmasked as a false resurrection.

Now I realize that I have spent most of my life fearing the light that emanates from human skin. And yet, I know that death is not something that can be resolved. Death is a place you enter, like a closet. Perhaps that shriveled fetus that I was should have remained palpitating in the dark so as to bypass mortality. But that fetus had to emerge from that tomb-womb, otherwise it would never have gained the energy that comes from despair, and the ingenuity that necessity engenders.

Often afterwards, to calm the furor of my mind, I would try to go back in time and replay what took place before the closet. I tried to replay my childhood, but I could not.

I could not.

It was as though I was watching a movie playing backwards. I wanted to retrace my steps with this movie. Get back to the beginning. To the beginning of my adventure. To be a little boy again. I wanted to exorcize the meaning of absence. I wanted my life to be the reverse of resignation and acceptation. But the movie always became blurred and incoherent.

I know it's impossible to go back into the past, but I wanted to feel again what I had felt before.

Before!
What a strange word. My before was something so vague, so difficult to find again, so unattainable. So …

Phew, Federman, what's going on? This is so serious. Your readers are going to find it boring. They're going to wonder what's happening to you. If you're not starting to cultivate senility.

What! No more mad laughter, no more sexual effrontery. What's wrong with you? No more exuberant typographical gimmicks. No more scatology. No more self-reflexiveness. It's not possible. Federman is now writing agonizing realism. That's what people are going to say.

It's true that I'm on the edge of the imposture of realism in this story, and that I could easily tumble into it. But when one tells the story of one's childhood one is always on the edge of the precipice of sentimentality that makes you crumble into whining realism. That's the risk to take while telling what happened in Montrouge during my childhood.

Well, I'll go on anyway

Standing naked in the dark, holding my clothes tightly against my chest, trembling not of cold but of fear, I listened to the sound of the policemen's boots as they came up the stairs to the third floor.

The door of our apartment remained open as the policemen went in, so I heard what they said. They called out the names of the people they came to arrest:
Simon Federman, Marguerite Federman, Sarah Federman, Raymond Federman, Jacqueline Federman.
In that order.

When they said, Raymond, I heard my mother say quickly, He's not here. He's in the country on vacation. The policemen didn't say anything.

Then I heard the policemen tell my parents to take some warm clothes because they didn't know where they were going to be taken and that the journey could be long, and that it could be cold there. The policemen didn't sound mean. They weren't speaking loudly. They were just doing their job.

In the darkness of the closet on the third floor of our building, 4 Rue Louis Rolland in Montrouge, I heard all this, but I could not comprehend why my mother had locked me in the dark. It was as though I was playing hide-and-seek, but I didn't know how long I had to remain hidden before being discovered.

During the long frightening hours I spent in that darkness, not daring to open the door, slowly sinking into oblivion, I felt that my childhood was being erased. That my childhood was tumbling into ...

Federman, watch out. Control your emotions and the tone of your sentences or you're going to end up writing decadent lyricism. And you're not going to start making metaphors, you who abhor metaphors.

I'm trying, I'm trying to control myself, but it's not easy when you tell something traumatic. Something which has remained in you all your life like a hole in your stomach. Or rather a hole in your memory, since my childhood was in the process of disappearing.

Well, I'll keep trying in spite of myself.

I remained in that dark hole from 5:30 in the morning until the next morning when finally I dared come out just as the sun was rising.

The reason I didn't dare come out was because the people who lived on the main floor of our building could have caught me and taken me to the police.

They didn't like Jews. They were the ones who had denounced us when the Vichy government ordered all the Jews to declare themselves and their possessions.

I still have the official document my father received on September 7, 1941, from
Monsieur Le Procureur de la République
ordering him to appear before
Le Tribunal de Première Instance
to declare his Jewish identity and the state of his belongings. I found that document among old papers left behind in our apartment when I returned to Montrouge at the end of the war.

Because we lived in a suburb where there were not too many Jews, my father had decided not to declare us. But that didn't last long. The people in our building denounced us and after that we were forced, my parents, sisters and I, to wear the yellow star on all our clothes.

I should perhaps insert here the poem I wrote that describes the day my mother sewed the yellow star on my coat and my school uniform.

Yes, I'm going to ...

Federman, now you are going too far. You're not going to start shoving poems in the middle of your stories as you did in your other books. I'm sure that every time your readers come to one of these poems, they skip over it. And besides, your publisher is going to complain and tell you that poetry doesn't sell any more.

Well, I'll tell him that personally I make no distinction when I write between poetry and prose. And that sometimes I manage to say better what I want to say in a short poem of a few lines than with two or three pages of prose. And besides that saves paper. It's not a blockbuster I want to write here. Just the story of my childhood.

So I'll put that poem here. And hell with it.

When the police opened the front gate of our building and entered the courtyard they called out,
Federman!
And the people on the main floor opened their window and shouted,
Third floor on the left!

Still half asleep in my bed, I saw my father and my mother rush to the window. Papa was in his pyjamas, and Maman in her nightgown. They didn't say anything, but they understood what was going on. That's when my mother pulled me out of my bed, shoved my clothes into my arms, and pushed me into the closet on the landing of the staircase.

Later I heard my parents and sisters go down the stairs with their little nomad bundles. I even heard the creaking of the gate as the police closed it, and I heard the sound of the truck's motor as it started.

That's when the story of my parents and sisters stopped. That's all I know of their story. I know nothing of what happened to them after ... after they ... I was going to say, abandoned me.

No, they did not abandon me. They hid me in that little box to preserve me. As one preserves something precious. The story of my parents and sisters closed with my mother's
shhh.
The title I have given to this book, and probably it's final word, if ever I reach the end of this story.

I know nothing of what happened to
Simon, Marguerite, Sarah,
and
Jacqueline Federman,
after the police truck left. Except the end. Yes, I know the end of their story. I know that they died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Auschwitz that fucking word. I have the documents that were painstakingly recorded and prove where and when they died.

You see, I even know with which convoy they left for Auschwitz. I did some research after the war. I obtained the official documents. I still have them.

According to these documents, they were deported separately on different dates.

My mother was deported first. She left from Pithiviers in convoy 14, wagon 16, on August 3
^rd
, 1942. Eighteen days after she was arrested.

The documents specify that upon arrival at Auschwitz, on August 5
^th
, of 52 men 22 were selected for work and received the numbers 56411 to 56432. 542 women were also selected and were given the numbers 15102 to 15267 and 15269 to 15644.

482 women were gassed upon arrival.

I don't know if my mother was among those who were selected. There were only 4 survivors of this convoy when Auschwitz was liberated in April 1945. My mother was not one of the survivors. But perhaps she managed to survive for a while. Even though she was not very tall, she was very strong. That's because of the hard work she did cleaning other people's houses and doing their laundry at the public
lavoir
de Montrouge.

My two sisters were deported together from Drancy in convoy 21, wagon 2, on August 19, 1942. They were immediately exterminated upon their arrival at Auschwitz. That's what the documents state. Except that, on these documents, the age of my sister Jacqueline is given erroneously. Jacqueline was not 15 when she was deported. She was only 12. I want to rectify that.

And yet, all my life, I have often dreamt that one of my sisters had survived, and that one day, by chance, we would find each other.

An old dream-cliché that many survivors have lugged hopelessly in their heads all their lives.

My father left Drancy in convoy 24, on August 28. He was immediately exterminated upon his arrival at Auschwitz. He had tuberculosis. One of his lungs had been removed. He spat blood all the time. I will tell later what it meant to live with a tubercular father, with a ...

Federman, if you continue like this, you'll sink into Zolaesque miserabilism.

I don't care. I have to tell the truth, even if the truth hurts. Yes, I know what my readers will say.

It's not a novel you're writing Federman, it's just plain straightforward autobiographical writing. Or worse, what the French call autofiction.

Well, I'll tell them that they are mistaken. What I'm writing is pure fiction, because, you see, I've forgotten my entire childhood. It has been blocked in me. So I've to reinvent it, reconstruct it. And besides, as Mallarmé once put it,
All that is written is fictive.

The blocks of words that I'm accumulating on the pages are like the bricks that are used to build a house. I'm in the process of building my childhood with these blocks of words.

So I'm going to continue accumulating, and we'll see where that'll take us.

As I was saying, before being interrupted, I know nothing of what happened between my mother's last word to me and her last breath.

I know nothing that happened to my father and my sisters, out there, in the East. I don't know how much they suffered, how hungry they were, if they were beaten, if they were cold, if they were frightened, if they saw each other, if my sisters were raped before being exterminated.

Well, everything has been told and retold about those who died in the camps. But all this has nothing to do with the story of my parents and sisters. All this is History, but not their story.

Their story? What happened after they were taken away? Nobody knows. No one can tell that story. Not even me. Except perhaps with ready-made sentences. Clichés. The story of my parents and sisters stopped when they went down the staircase. From that moment on they became absences. They were erased from history:
X-X-X-X