Shhh (6 page)

Papa, I'm sure, knew what passion was. He was a passionate man. He loved women.
Il était coureur de femmes.
That's what all my aunts and uncles always said about him, un coureur de femmes, but also
un fainéant, un rien-du-tout. Papa.

So what. Maybe that's what he left me when he changed tense. His passion. His passion for women. For love. For sex? Look, it's not because I am writing about my father that I have to become prudish.

Yes, even me, while listening to the sad voice of the singer singing Ramona
je t'aimerai toute la vie
… I would feel tenderness for her, and I would imagine her being
petite et fragile,
with very long black hair and very long eyelashes. That's all I could imagine about her then. Today I could imagine her much better if I could listen to her sing
Ramona.
Today I know how to imagine a beautiful woman.

When papa listened to “Ramona” there was dreaming in his eyes, I could see that, and I know he was dreaming about his failed vocation. And probably also about his failed loves. When papa listened to Ramona, sitting in his old broken down armchair, facing the phonograph, I could tell he was making up stories about how he could have been great if ...

Ah! yes, if ...

I could see it in his eyes, but I could also feel it in his fingers, in his fingernails gently scratching my back. As I sat on the floor next to his armchair, I would say to him,
Papa gratte-moi le dos, s'il te plaît, ça me gratte là, près de l'omoplate gauche,
and my father would scratch my back. We had studied human anatomy in school, that's why I could tell my father to scratch my left clavicle because it itched.

I could feel he was dreaming in the way his fingers moved slowly on my back. He was dreaming of the great works of art he would have liked to have created, but never did.

Not because he was lazy, as my aunts and uncles said he was, and not because he was sick all the time. But because he was not ready yet. The tense changed too soon for him. I am sure he would have created something immortal, if he had been given the time. I could feel it in his fingers. Papa had beautiful hands, with long fingers.

Deep inside he knew he had failed, failed to achieve what was inscribed in him, by his father, or some remote ancestor.

All the others before him, his father, grand-father, great-grand-father, and all those who preceded them probably failed each in their own way. Except that, it is said, that there was one Federman who, way back in the 16th century, was a famous conquistador who became very rich in the new world. But he was a mean bastard, and as the story goes, the ship which was bringing him back to Europe sank in the ocean, and all the treasures he had accumulated disappeared forever.

I once wrote a poem about my father's ancestors. I'll put it here, for whatever it's worth. It's called ...

While contemplating his failures, and absentmindedly scratching my back, my father was perhaps thinking that his son, I mean me, would someday achieve what he had failed to achieve. And so, aware that his tuberculosis might soon kill him, or that some unforgivable enormity would erase him from history, Papa with his hand on my back would try to make me feel this yearning for greatness. With the tips of his fingers he would try to transmit his dreams into my body, into my skin, my flesh, my bones.

Lost in his reveries, as I was slowly dozing off under the gentle touch of his hand, Papa would ... ah, shit how shall I say it ...? He would give me my inheritance. His dreams. That's all he gave me.

The other day, while taking a shower, I surprised myself humming
Ramonaaaa je t'aimeraiiiii toute la vieeee ...
letting my voice drag the words into the soapy water.

Now back to the description of our apartment. In the middle of the dining room stood a big table and five chairs, since we were five living in that room. And against the wall, near the window, the cot on which I slept.

That cot, even when it became a bit too small for my growing body, was my private domain.

I kept my tin soldiers and my stamp collection under that bed. I mostly collected stamps from the French colonies because they were big and beautiful, with pictures of people of different colors and wild animals. My stamp collection made me want to explore these far-away places. I would imagine myself being a daring adventurer, or a soldier in
La légion étrangère.
I had one stamp from Senegal that I particularly loved because it was triangular. I'd gotten it from one of the older boys at school. I gave him two cigarettes for that stamp. Two cigarettes I'd stolen from my father's pack.

Under my bed I also kept my marbles and my knuckle-bones. I liked playing these games in the street with the other boys my age, even though I rarely won. But the most important things I kept under my bed were my Jules Verne books. Ah, Jules Verne! Sometimes, during the night, when my parents were asleep, I would read one of Jules Verne's books under the blankets with a little flashlight.

My favorite was
Michel Strogoff.
I kept rereading it. I wanted to be like Michel Strogoff. I wanted to have my eyes burned like his by the inflamed sword of a Russian Cossack of the Tzar's army. I also wanted to go around the world in eighty days, and to the moon, and to the center of the earth, and to the bottom of the sea. I had all the Jules Verne, but also other adventure books. Especially cloak-and-dagger novels. My parents could not afford to buy me these books, so I would have to wait until my cousin Salomon had finished reading his so he could give them to me. They were not always in good condition, but still I wanted them. Salomon didn't really care to keep his books. He always got everything he wanted. The aunts and uncles would spoil him just because he was the first of all the cousins.

He also had a lot of comic books, but he was not allowed to read them until he finished his homework and his piano lessons. If Leon caught him reading a comic book before he was finished, Leon would really get angry.

Sometimes, when Salomon was upstairs doing his homework, and his parents were working downstairs in the atelier, he would send me to buy comic books for him. I had to hide them inside my pants to bring them back upstairs.

To go up into the house, I had to pass in front of Leon's atelier, and if my uncle saw me trying to sneak by the window, he would shout, Come here, you little coward and let me see what you're hiding in your pants. Leon had caught me several times with comic books hidden inside my pants against my stomach, and each time I had to explain that it was Salomon who sent me to get them. I would go buy those comic books for my cousin because I knew that when he'd be finished reading them I would get them.

So I stood piteously in front of my uncle Leon while he shoved his hand inside my pants and pulled out
Les Pieds-Nickelés
or
Mandrake le magicien
or
Tarzan
or
Tintin,
and many others like that.

Leon would throw the comics into the garbage can, and then he would step out into the courtyard and call out to Salomon to come down, and when my cousin came into the atelier Leon would slap him hard across the face. There was such anger in Leon's eyes, it frightened me. But he never hit me. It was always Salomon who got it because of the comic books.

I'll tell you more about my cousin Salomon when I am finished describing our apartment.

It's in my cot that I masturbated for the first time. And often after that. I'll have to tell that too later. Sorry to mention it, but it was something I did when I was growing up. It was part of my childhood. And I suppose part of every boy's childhood.

Behind the curtain where my parents slept, there was a nightstand on my father's side of the bed on which he kept his personal things. His medicine, his wallet, his watch, his cigarettes. Even though he had tuberculosis, my father smoked all the time.
Gitanes
without filters. In those days, cigarettes didn't have filters. Sometimes my father would send me to the bureau de tabac at the corner of our street to buy his cigarettes.

On the side of the bed where my mother slept, there was a small, narrow closet in which our clothes were stored and where my parents kept their private papers in cardboard boxes.

I made this long descriptive detour of our apartment just to arrive at this closet which was not the closet into which my mother hid me.

That closet was on the landing. In it we kept things we didn't need every day.

When I returned to Montrouge at the end of the war, after the three miserable years I spent on the farm in Southern France, I discovered that everything in our apartment had been stolen. Everything. Probably by the neighbors, though they claimed that it was the Germans who took everything. I never believed that.

What was curious is that in Leon and Marie's apartment everything remained just like before. I mean, before they left for the free zone, a few days before the big round-up of the Jews. Every piece of furniture was in place.

I learned later it was Marius, from the corner café, who warned Leon that all the Jews in Paris and in the suburbs were going to be arrested. Marius' brother-in-law was a
gendarme,
and he is the one who told him when
La Grande Rafle
would take place.

The Jews who had money were able to escape to the free zone by paying the
passeurs,
as they were known. These were people who made deals with the Germans so they could sneak Jews across the line of demarcation. They would split the money they got with the Germans. Sometimes, they would get more than money. They would force the frightened Jews to give them the jewelry they had taken with them.

That's where all my mother's brothers and sisters went. To the free zone. They all had money, and that's why they all survived.

It has not been said enough that mostly the poor Jews were deported and died in the camps. Those who could not afford a train ticket to get away. Those who were abandoned by their families, as my parents were.

A few days before the great round-up, aunt Marie came up to our apartment, and said to my mother, Take the children and come with us, and leave him behind, your lazy good-for-nothing husband.

My father was not home that day, when aunt Marie said that to my mother. But my sisters and I heard what she said,
Prends les gosses et viens avec nous, et laisse-le lui.
And we saw how my mother spat in her sister's face as she burst into tears.

Lui, him, that was my father, whom everybody in the family hated.

I witnessed that scene. It has remained inscribed in me.

Well, enough of that. I've already told that ugly scene in
Aunt Rachel's Fur.
What I wanted to say, is that in Leon and Marie's apartment everything was there when they returned at the end of the war. They payed someone to watch over their possessions. Probably Marius and his brother-in-law.

Marius and Leon were always making deals. Marius would buy food from the black market for my uncle, and Leon would make pants for him for free. Marius was known in the neighborhood as the king of the black market. He could get anything that was rationed. Anything. Eggs, meat, soap, sugar, chocolate, perfume, silk stockings, anything that could no longer be found in grocery stores or the department stores during the German occupation.

I suppose that's why nothing was stolen from Leon and Marie's apartment. But in our place everything had been pillaged.

The lock on the door of our apartment was broken, and inside it was completely empty, except for a broken chair shoved into a corner of the room next to the old musty mattress of my parents' bed. Everything else had disappeared. The buffet, my father's phonograph, his armchair, the stove, my sister's folding bed. Everything. Even the chamber pot and the hygienic pail. Even my sisters' dolls and my tin soldiers. And my stamp collection too. And all my Jules Verne.

I remember how I stood in the middle of this emptiness, trying to imagine how it was when we were still living there, even though it was small, it was our home. The floor creaked as I walked to the kitchen. My steps left marks in the dust on the floor. I looked in the kitchen. It was completely empty. I looked into the small closet. On the floor there was a pile of rags. Torn old clothes that were probably found useless by those who came to take away our possessions. But in the small bedroom closet I found a cardboard box full of old torn and yellowed letters and papers, and a few photos. Family photos.