The Only Girl in the World

by Maude Julien

  We are in the dining room. My mother and I are standing in front of my father, who is looking daggers at us. I’ve never seen my mother so afraid. She stammers something about someone who’s been killed and how his wife threw herself over him and how it’s ‘the end of the world’. My father barks at me in his stentorian voice: ‘How did she know? How did she find out?’ I’m terrified. I have no idea what he’s talking about. How did she know what? My throat feels tight, not a sound comes out. He accuses me of ‘covering for’ my mother, then turns to her and bombards her with questions: ‘How did you find out? Who told you about Kennedy? How do you know he’s been assassinated? Answer me, you idiot! Answer!’

  Someone’s been assassinated? Who? Is the body in the house? And why does my mother keep saying we’ll soon have a third world war?

  Eventually she cracks and admits that she secretly listens to the radio. My father is beside himself. ‘Where is this radio? Go and find it!’ he bellows at me. I’m rooted to the spot; all I know is I mustn’t cry. Then my mother comes up behind me and knees me in the back, saying between gritted teeth, ‘See what happens on your birthday!’ She goes back upstairs and reappears carrying an old radio with big dials. My father sends me to get a hammer from the cellar and then tells my mother: ‘Jeannine, give it a really good whack.’

  That night I hear my mother crying in her room. I feel guilty; I did something terrible and someone has died because of me. I start wondering whether my father really is my father or if he is actually my mother’s father. I tell myself the man who’s been assassinated is her real husband. Which makes him my real father, and he might have died trying to help us. I lie there in bed, heavy-hearted and shivering in the cold.

  One question plagues me: who are my mother’s real parents? I realize I have absolutely no idea. My mother never talks about them. My father is not very talkative either, but, for my edification, he does occasionally tell me about his tough, impoverished childhood. As a boy, he had to slip between the bars of gates or into basements to steal things that his father then sold in his grocery store. His father was a harsh man who beat him hard. My father also talks about the bombings during World War I. He was twelve in 1914 and experienced true famine; he even had to eat rats. He mentions his mother less frequently and, when he does, his voice starts to tremble.

  My mother, though, never has anything to say about her childhood. When I ask her, ‘Who is your mother and where is she?’ she gives me only crumbs of information. I gradually piece together that she was born into a mining family in Fives, in the north. There were seven or eight children, all girls except for one boy. ‘They’re not educated or intelligent,’ she says.

  I ask her why she left them. ‘One day,’ she tells me, ‘my eldest sister Henriette came home with your father. At the time, he looked very tall and frightening to me. They took me to his house. I didn’t know I’d never go back home to my parents, but when I figured it out, I didn’t miss them.’ She was sent away to boarding school very young, and was extremely happy there. Then she went to university so that she’d be able to home-school me when the time came.

  ‘I was six when your father came to take me away,’ she says. ‘The same age you are now. You see, I mean as much to him as you do.’ It’s as if a light has suddenly appeared at the end of a tunnel. ‘What about me? Now that I’m six, will someone come to take me away too?’ I ask hopefully. ‘We’ve done all this for you,’ she answers icily, ‘and you don’t understand anything. You always want to leave. If you say that to your father, you’ll kill him. And it will be all your fault.’

  Madame Descombes

  In my father’s opinion, music is more important than any other subject. He and my mother aren’t musicians so they enrol me in a correspondence course. I can already name the notes as I sing and read all the keys. I’m studying sharps and flats, and major and minor keys. It’s time I start learning to play an instrument. At first my parents want me to study the piano by correspondence, but they eventually concede that this isn’t very practical.

  That’s how Madame Descombes comes into my life. My parents choose her because she teaches piano at the conservatory in Lille and used to be a concert pianist. She’s an older lady, tiny and thin with short grey hair, which I think is very beautiful. I’ve never seen a woman with short hair before. She asks me if I can play anything. ‘I can do some scales,’ I say shyly.

  ‘Good. Play me a scale in C major.’

  To her astonishment, I play the scale in the correct order with my right hand but in the wrong order with my left. ‘Who on earth taught you that?’ she exclaims. My mother is sitting in on this first lesson so I don’t dare say she was the one who ‘explained’ how I should play a scale, based on the lesson sent to us. ‘I did, with the lesson notes,’ I stammer. ‘If you don’t know something,’ Madame Descombes says sternly, ‘you have to find out! You should have asked your mother.’

  Twice a month my parents drive me to her house, not far from Lille. Every time I am filled with anguish. First of all, there’s the memory of that excruciating first lesson. I’m ashamed that I claimed I could play when I couldn’t. There’s also the fear that I haven’t properly grasped the last lesson and may have done my exercises wrong. But I’m also very glad to be seeing her again. She quickly sets my scales right and teaches me how to recognize all the keys.

  When she shows me how to play a piece, hearing her play so well makes my heart pound. She’s a strict and demanding teacher, but she’s fair. She puts five-franc pieces on the backs of my hands to keep them perfectly flat when I play. If I make a mistake, she raps me over the fingers with her ruler. But she never hurts my spirit, she only hits me to correct my mistakes. I know the rule and we both respect it. She never confides anything or pays me any compliments. But I adore Madame Descombes and I get the impression she’s pleased with my progress.

  We sit at a beautiful baby grand piano, in front of a picture painted by her daughter. Madame Descombes once told me her daughter had never taken any interest in music. She preferred art so she chose to become a painter. I look at the painting and can’t understand how she could ‘choose’. We do things because we have to.

  Madame Descombes can’t bear musicians who pull faces when they’re playing. If I ever frown or bite my lip, she takes a mirror from her bag and puts it in front of me. ‘We’re not at the circus here, you’re not a monkey entertaining the crowd with your grimacing. You’re interpreting a score, and it’s your playing that should carry the expression, not your face.’

  Another thing Madame Descombes can’t stand is injured hands. She scolds me when she sees the scratches on my skin. I lower my head. I don’t dare tell her my father has started more construction work. We’re cementing the cellar floors this year. As usual, he’s asked the two workmen, Albert and Rémi, to use me as a ‘labourer’ for two two-hour stints every day. ‘To learn the harsh realities of life.’ So I have to shift wheelbarrow loads of sand, turn the cement mixer and carry bricks by hand. And I’m strictly forbidden from wearing protective gloves.

  One day, when the tips of my fingers are sore and bleeding, she gets angry. ‘That’s enough, I’m going to have words with your parents. They need to stop.’ How did she know? When the lesson is over I hear her talking to my mother. ‘You know how important a pianist’s hands are,’ she says. ‘And anyway, it isn’t normal for a little girl’s fingers to be in that state.’ She’s determined to come downstairs and discuss the matter with my father, who is waiting in the car. ‘Listen,’ my mother says, stopping her. ‘My husband’s not well, we need to leave. But I promise I’ll talk to him about it.’ Madame Descombes adds that I’m making progress: ‘She’s a gifted child, you really should enrol her at the conservatory where she can prepare properly for exams and competitions.’ I immediately picture myself setting off for the conservatory with Madame Descombes, meeting other musicians there, and working hard. I’ll do anything to make her proud.

  This isn’t the first time Madame Descom
bes has mentioned the conservatory. But my mother never says a word about it. ‘Everything okay?’ my father asks before starting the car. My mother just says yes. I try to bring up the conservatory, but she interrupts me: ‘Be quiet, that’s all nonsense,’ she snaps. ‘What is?’ my father asks. ‘Oh, nothing, I’ll explain later,’ she tells him.

  For a long time after that, I imagine I hear someone ringing the doorbell: Madame Descombes has come to see my father and insists that I must go to the conservatory. In actual fact, I never see her again, or hear another word about her. My parents say nothing and I don’t dare ask. It’s as if she never existed.

  None of which means I stop playing the piano. My father decides that from now on Yves, my accordion teacher, will give me piano lessons too. Yves conducts a small band that plays at local dances. He’s an excellent musician who can play Liszt and Chopin, but his mood swings terrify me.

  As a child, Yves was taught the accordion the hard way, strapped to his chair for twelve hours a day by his father. This turned him into a virtuoso player, but an appalling teacher. Thin, and a chain-smoker, he fidgets around me as I play. At the tiniest mistake, he cuffs me and hurls insults at me. He shouts so much I can’t even understand what I did wrong.

  Sometimes he’s not so on edge, but that’s even more worrying. On these occasions when he wants to punish me, he throws his beer in my face. Or he stubs out his cigarette on my thigh. I’m so tense that my playing goes from bad to worse. The punishments come thick and fast. During my first piano lesson, he’s obviously surprised by the quality of my playing, which is mainly thanks to Madame Descombes. ‘How come you play so well, when you’re so hopeless on the accordion with me?’ In a flash his amazement turns to fury. He slaps me twice, and to help calm his mood, he snatches my favourite scores and tears them into little pieces.

  One day my father rings the bell three times to summon me to the verandah. ‘You’ll soon be seven, so you can understand what I’m about to explain,’ he says. ‘I have already told you about German concentration camps during the war. When you arrive at a camp, everything you have is taken from you. If you have a gold tooth, they pull it out. Whether you’re rich and beautiful or poor and ugly when you arrive, they put you in the same pyjamas and shave your head. Whatever skills you have, no one can see them. The guards are stupid and cruel. Showing signs of intelligence is dangerous.

  ‘The only people who make it out of concentration camps alive are musicians. There have always been bands and there always will be. Because sheep would rather move about than think. The guards, who are the stupidest sort of sheep, love moving in time to music, and that’s why they take care of the musicians and feed them better than the others.

  ‘You need to know every type of music, but you’ll have a better chance of getting out alive with a musette-waltz than a concerto. As for instruments, it’s hard to predict which will be most in demand. So you’ll study several. We’re going to change your schedule so you have extra time to practise. I’ve asked Yves to give me a list of instruments to order for you. Off you go.’

  Not for a second does my father take into consideration Yves’s brutality; what matters above all else is his mastery of several instruments. Yves becomes my regular music teacher for many years to come. Spurred on by his insults and slaps, I learn to play guitar, clarinet, violin, tenor saxophone and trumpet, as well as piano and accordion. By the time I’m eight, I’ll be pretty much equipped to survive in a concentration camp.

  We Sagittarians

  In his study my father has two safes, both bigger than I am. They are so huge and solid I find them almost beautiful, almost reassuring. One has a combination lock. My father sometimes summons me to this room to teach me how to open a safe without knowing the code. It will be very useful, he explains, if I am ever short of money. In the event that I am, I have to identify a casino to rob. The advantage of casino safes is that, even though they are full of money, they are not as closely guarded as those at the Banque de France. Once the safe is open, I must respect the rules: take only cash and leave jewellery and other valuables. It is when you come to trade in jewellery that you get caught, because the dealers are often in cahoots with the police.

  He makes me sit on the floor and put my ear to the lock mechanism. While he carefully turns the graduated dials one way and then the other, I have to listen attentively to the sounds produced by the cogs turning on their axes. In a half-whisper he calmly describes each stage with a remarkable patience completely at odds with his usual brusque manner. I like these sessions when, deep in silence, we both strain our ears to pick up the barely perceptible click-click-click-click of the workings on the other side of that metal door.

  The training never lasts very long. ‘Right, it’s time you went back to your schoolwork,’ he says. Before leaving, I try to think of something nice to say to him. One time I ask, ‘Do you think one day I’ll be able to open safes like you?’ ‘You’re my daughter,’ he replies, ‘you’ll be able to open any safe.’ Coming from him this is a genuine compliment and it warms my heart. I so want him to appreciate me a little!

  Some days my father calls me into the large billiard room to teach me about the world with the help of a huge floor globe mounted on a stand and ringed by a wooden hoop. It is a beautiful thing and it fuels my dreams. I do not know what it is made of, but the surface is smooth and soft to the touch. When I’m alone in this room I stroke the planet Earth covered with magical places. I close my eyes and spin it, bringing a finger down at random, then open my eyes and whisper a promise to myself: ‘You’ll go there one day.’ I contemplate the signs of the Zodiac engraved on the hoop. My father has taught me to recognize the centaur drawing back its bow. ‘That’s us,’ he says, ‘we Sagittarians.’ He does not believe in ‘astrological claptrap’, but still has a soft spot for our sign. Whenever I can, I come to look at that fabulous creature, half-man, half-horse. I admire its strength, the bow drawn back and that arrow ‘pointing in the right direction’, as my father says, and he always adds a comment that I struggle to make sense of in relation to the arrow: ‘Act wisely!’

  One day I ask him what sign my mother is. He points a contemptuous finger at the poor scorpion, a shameful crawling creature. I feel bad for my mother. But I think that, as she is the sign just before ours, she must have some horse in her too.

  Using the globe, my father shows me all the countries he flew over in a hot air balloon with his favourite copilot, my aunt Henriette. My father talks about her as if she were something extraordinary, an aviator like him and passionate about ballooning. I have met my aunt Henriette only once: shortly after we moved to the house she came over accompanied by two gorgeous collie dogs. I was too young to have anything more than vague memories of her.

  Before the war, when my mother was a tiny baby, Henriette and my father often flew together and won ballooning races. He remembers with amusement all the times when, just before landing, he quickly had to throw off some ballast because Henriette had caught sight of a bull in the vicinity and refused point blank to touch down! And back up they would go, not knowing where or when they would be able to land again.

  On one occasion a navigational error brought them over the German town of Landsberg an der Warthe during one of Hitler’s speeches. My father shows me a photo of them with four German officers and two men in civilian clothes, my aunt smiling nervously in the middle of the group of men, who seem fascinated by this little slip of a woman wearing a man’s checked shirt and riding breeches.

  Henriette’s thrills and spills always make my father laugh. Listening to him, I start to think Henriette must be a really great person. If my mother and I can be just a fraction of who she is, we too might earn my father’s indulgence and admiration.

  During the war Henriette enlisted as a nurse and it was in a military hospital that she met the doctor who would become her husband. Meanwhile my father joined the Resistance in Lille. He dug underground passages to help Jews flee to Belgium. He also traded on the black
market to make enough money to pay for food, residency papers and people smugglers for the fugitives.

  My father’s face lights up and his voice softens when he tells me about his younger days. I am fascinated not only by the stories he tells me, but by the expressions that suddenly brighten his usually deadpan features. He was a hero in his time. If only I had been born sooner, I could have met the passionate, dashing man he once was. The winged centaur crossing Europe on a misread compass needle. The Robin Hood risking his life to snatch the oppressed from the clutches of the Nazis. The great Freemason dignitary who ‘did as he pleased’, appearing, for example, before the Queen of England in red shoes. The ‘charitable Knight of the Holy City’ secretly working for the good of mankind. I still recall my amazement at this knight in full regalia, carrying his sword and with a large cross on his chest, as he appeared in my bedroom some evenings. But that was before. Before he decided to leave this abominable world and shut himself away with us in the house.

  The last time my father ordered me to go to the workshop behind the swimming pool with him, he told me to unwrap a parcel: yards and yards of strange pale-yellow fabric. This special material was used for making balloons. It was from the post-war days when my father was working hard to relaunch hot air balloons at Bondues airfield. He and Henriette were the first to fly again, using airships they had made with their own hands. Sometimes I sneak off to touch that magic fabric, and I picture myself making a balloon so I can fly away with Linda and Pitou.

  The Swimming Pool

  Since I stopped having piano lessons with Madame Descombes, we hardly ever leave the house. Everything is arranged to keep outings to a minimum. There’s no need to go to the bakery: we have a kneading trough and a professional oven in which my mother and I make bread twice a month. No need to go to the grocery store either: four times a year we ring though a large order on the telephone, and the goods are delivered by truck.