When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (13 page)

“It’s nice here,” said Anna. “We wouldn’t have been able to have breakfast in our pyjamas at the Gasthof Zwirn.”

“It’s a bit small,” said Mama. “But we’ll manage.”

Max stretched himself and yawned. “It’s nice having our own place.”

There was something more that was nice. Anna could not at first think what it was. She looked at Mama pouring coffee and at Max tilting back his chair as he had been told a hundred times not to. Through the thin walls she could hear Papa’s typewriter. Then it came to her.

“I don’t really mind where we are,” she said—“as long as we’re all together.”

In the afternoon Papa took them out. They went on the Underground which was called the Metro and had a peculiar smell. Papa said it was a mixture of garlic and French cigarettes and Anna rather liked it. They saw the Eiffel Tower (but did not go up it because it would have cost too much) and the place where Napoleon was buried, and at last the Arc de Triomphe which was quite near home. By this time it was getting late, but Max noticed that you could go up to the top and that it was quite cheap, probably because it was not nearly as high as the Eiffel Tower—so they went.

No one else wanted to go to the top of the Arc de Triomphe on this cold, dark afternoon and the lift was empty. When Anna stepped out at the top she was met by an icy blast of wind and a prickle of raindrops and she wondered whether it had been a good idea to come. Then she looked down. It was as though she were standing at the centre of a huge sparkling star. Its rays stretched out in all directions and each one was a road lined with lights. When she looked closer she could see other lights which were cars and buses crawling along the roads, and immediately below they formed a bright ring circling the Arc de Triomphe itself. In the distance were the dim shapes of domes and spires and the twinkling spot which was the top of the Eiffel Tower.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” said Papa. “Isn’t this a beautiful city?”

Anna looked at Papa. His overcoat had lost a button and the wind was blowing through it, but Papa did not seem to notice.

“Beautiful,” said Anna.

It was nice to get back to the warm flat, and this time Grete had helped Mama with the supper and it was ready in good time.

“Have you learned any French yet?” asked Mama.

“Of course not,” said Grete before anyone else could answer. “It takes months.”

But Anna and Max found that they had picked up quite a few words just from listening to Papa and other people. They could say
“oui”
and
“non”
and
“merci”
and
“au revoir”
and
“bonsoir Madame”,
and Max was particularly proud of
“trois billets s’il vous plaît”
which was what Papa had said when he bought tickets for the Metro.

“Well, you’ll know a lot more soon,” said Mama. “I’ve arranged for a lady to come and give you French lessons, and she’s starting tomorrow afternoon.”

The lady’s name was Mademoiselle Martel and the following morning Anna and Max tried to collect everything they would need for her lesson. Papa lent them an old French dictionary and Mama found them some paper to write on. The only thing neither of them had was a pencil.

“You’ll have to go and buy some,” said Mama. “There’s a shop at the corner of the street.”

“But we can’t speak French!” cried Anna.

“Nonsense,” said Mama. “Take the dictionary with you. I’ll give you a franc each and you can keep the change.”

“What’s the French for pencil?” asked Max.

“Un crayon,”
said Mama. Her voice did not sound as French as Papa’s but she knew quite a lot of words. “Now off you go—quickly.”

By the time they had travelled down in the lift by themselves—and it was Anna’s turn to press the button—Anna felt quite bold about the enterprise, and her courage did not falter even when she found that the shop was rather grand and sold more office equipment than stationery. Clutching the dictionary under her arm she marched through the door ahead of Max and said in ringing tones,
“Bonsoir Madame
!
”

The owner of the shop looked astonished and Max nudged her.

“That’s not a
Madame
—that’s a
Monsieur,”
he whispered. ‘And I think
bonsoir
means good evening.”

“Oh!” said Anna.

But the man who owned the shop did not seem to mind. He smiled and said something in French which they could not understand. They smiled back.

Then Anna said hopefully,
“Un crayon,”
and Max added,
“S’il vous plaît.”

The man smiled again, searched in a cardboard box behind the counter and produced a beautiful red pencil which he handed to Anna.

She was so amazed at her success that she forgot to say
“Merci”
and just stood there with the pencil in her hand. This was easy!

Then Max said,
“Un crayon,”
because he needed one too.

“Oui, oui,”
said the man, smiling and nodding and pointing to the pencil in Anna’s hand. He agreed with Max that it was a pencil.

“Non!”
said Max.
“Un crayon!”
He sought about for a way to explain.
“Un crayon,”
he cried, pointing to himself.
“Un crayon!”

Anna giggled because it looked as though Max were introducing himself.

“Aah!” said the man. He took another pencil out of the box and handed it to Max with a little bow.

“Merci,”
said Max, much relieved. He gave the man the two francs and waited for the change. After a while it appeared that there wasn’t any. Anna was very disappointed. It would have been nice to have some money.

“Let’s ask him if he has any other pencils,” she whispered. “They might be cheaper.”

“We can’t!” said Max.

“Well, let’s just try,” said Anna who was sometimes very pig-headed. “Look up the French for other.”

Max leafed through the dictionary while the man watched him curiously. At last he found it. “It’s
‘autre’,”
he said.

Anna smiled brightly and held out her pencil to the man.
“Un autre crayon?”
she said.

“Oui, oui,”
said the man after a moment’s hesitation. He gave her another pencil from the box. Now she had two.

“Non,”
said Anna, handing one of the pencils back to him. His smile was getting a bit frozen.
“Un autre crayon
...”—she made a face and a shape with her fingers to suggest something infinitely small and unimportant.

The man stared at her to see if she was going to do anything else. Then he shrugged his shoulders and said something hopeless in French.

“Come on!” said Max, pink with embarrassment.

“No!” said Anna. “Give me the dictionary!” She turned the pages feverishly. At last she found it. Cheap ...
bon-marché.

“Un bon-marché crayon!”
she cried triumphantly, startling two ladies who were examining a typewriter.
“Un bon-marché
crayon, s’il vous plaît!”

The man looked very tired. He found another cardboard box and took from it a thinner blue pencil. He gave it to Anna who nodded and gave him back the red one. Then the man gave her twenty centimes change. Then he looked questioningly at Max.

“Oui!”
said Anna excitedly.
“Un autre bon-marché crayon!”
and the procedure was repeated with Max’s pencil.

“Merci,”
said Max.

The man just nodded. He seemed worn out.

“We’ve got twenty centimes each,” said Anna. “Think of what we’ll be able to buy with that!”

“I don’t think it’s very much,” said Max.

“Still, it’s better than nothing,” said Anna. She wanted to show the man that she was grateful, so as they went out of the shop she smiled at him again and said,
“Bonsoir Madame!”

Mademoiselle Martel arrived in the afternoon—a French lady in a neat grey suit, with a shaggy pepper and salt bun. She had been a school teacher and spoke a little German, a fact which so far had been of little interest to anyone. But now Paris was suddenly crowded with refugees from Hitler, all eager to learn French, and she was run off her feet trying to give them all lessons. Perhaps, thought Anna, this was the reason for the perpetual expression of mild surprise on her slightly faded face.

She was a very good teacher. Right from the beginning she spoke French to the children nearly the whole of the time, using sign language and mime when they did not understand.

“Le nez”,
she would say, pointing to her well powdered nose,
“la main”,
pointing to her hand, and
“les doigts”,
wiggling her fingers. Then she would write the words down for them and they would practise spelling and pronouncing them until they knew them. Occasionally there were misunderstandings, such as when she said
“les cheveux”,
pointing to her hair. Max became convinced that
cheveux
meant bun and burst into embarrassed giggles when she asked him to point out his own
cheveux.

On the days when she did not come to give them a lesson they did home-work. At first they just learned new words but after quite a short time Mademoiselle Martel demanded that they write little stories in French.

How could they? asked Anna. They didn’t know enough French.

Mademoiselle Martel tapped the dictionary with her finger.
“Le dictionnaire,”
she said firmly.

It turned out to be a terrible struggle. They had to look up almost every word and it took Anna nearly all morning to write half a page. Then, when she showed it to Mademoiselle Martel at their next lesson, most of it was wrong anyway.

“Never mind, it will come,” said Mademoiselle Martel in one of her rare excursions into German, and “Never mind, it will come!” Max said mockingly to Anna the following day, when she was still struggling after more than an hour to put down some boring incident between a dog and a cat.

“What about you? You haven’t done yours yet, either,” said Anna crossly.

“Yes I have,” said Max. “A page and a bit.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Look for yourself!”

It was quite true. He had written more than a page and it all looked like French.

“What does it mean?” Anna asked suspiciously.

Max translated with a flourish.

“Once a boy had his birthday. Many people came. They had a big feast. They ate fish, meat, butter, bread, eggs, sugar, strawberries, lobsters, ice cream, tomatoes, flour ...”

“They wouldn’t eat flour,” said Anna.

“You don’t know what they ate,” said Max. “Anyway I’m not sure that word is flour. I looked it all up at the time but I’ve forgotten.”

“Is all this a list of what they ate?” asked Anna, pointing to the page crawling with commas.

“Yes,” said Max.

“And what is this last bit?” There was just one sentence at the end which had no commas in it.

“That’s the best part,” said Max proudly. “I think it means ‘then they all burst’.”

Mademoiselle Martel read Max’s composition without batting an eye-lid. She said she could see it had increased his vocabulary. But she was less pleased when, for his following day’s home work, he produced an almost identical piece. This oen began “Once there was a wedding,” and the food the wedding guests ate was different, but it ended with everyone bursting as before. Mademoiselle Martel frowned and drummed her fingers on the dictionary. Then she told Max very firmly that he must write something different next time.

Next morning the children were sitting at the dining-room table with their books spread out on the red oilcloth as usual. Anna was wrestling with a piece about a man who had a horse and a cat. The man liked the cat and the cat liked the horse and the horse liked the man but it did not like the cat ... It was sickening stuff to be turning out when there were so many interesting things she could have written about if only she had been able to write in German.

Max was not writing anything at all, but staring into space. When Grete came in and told them to clear their things away because she wanted to lay the table for lunch his sheet of paper was still blank.

“But it’s only twelve o’clock!” cried Anna.

“I shan’t have time to do it later,” said Grete crossly as usual.

“Well, there’s nowhere else we can work—this is the only table,” said Max—and they prevailed on her, with difficulty, to let them keep it a little longer.

“What are you going to do?” asked Anna. “We want to go out this afternoon.”

Max seemed to come to a decision. “Pass me the dictionary,” he said.

As he leafed through it briskly (they were both becoming very practised at this) Anna heard him murmuring “funeral” under his breath.

When Mademoiselle Martel came to give them their next lesson she read Max’s composition in silence. Max had done his best to introduce variety into his basic theme. The funeral guests in his story—no doubt carried away by grief—ate paper, pepper, penguins, pemmican and peaches in addition to less exotic foodstuffs, and after his usual punch-line about how they all burst at the end Max had added the words, “So there were many more funerals.”

Mademoiselle Martel did not speak at all for a few moments. Then she gave Max a long, hard look and said, “Young man, you need a change.”

When Mama came in at the end of the lesson as she often did to ask how the children were getting on, Mademoiselle Martel made a little speech. She said she had taught them now for three weeks and that they had made good progress. But the time had come when they would learn more by being with other children and hearing French spoken all round them.

Mama nodded. Clearly she had been thinking the same thing.

“It’s nearly Christmas,” she said. “Perhaps you would give them one or two more lessons before the holidays, and then they can start school.”

Even Max worked hard during the remaining time. The prospect of going to a school where no one spoke anything but French was rather daunting.