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 phon
ograph, 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.
These old rags, these documents and these photos, that’s all that was left of my family. My inheritance.
I sat on the floor and one by one I took out the old papers and photographs from that box. Most of the papers were in such bad condition they were falling apart. The one thing I did find that was still in good condition was a livret de la caisse d’épargne de Montrouge made out to me.
I’ll tell later how I got this saving’s account booklet, and how I succeeded in collecting the money. It’s a very funny story. But first ...
Do you know Federman what you should do before going on? You should make a list of all the stories you promised to tell us. This way, you won’t forget.
Good idea. A list like that will wet the potential readers’ mouths, if I may allow myself a liquid metaphor, and this way they’ll want to continue reading. It will keep them in suspense.
Okay, I’ll make a list of these stories before revealing what I found in that box in the bedroom closet that convinced me that my father was probably unfaithful.
List of scenes of my childhood to be written.
1. Scene describing how my uncle Leon planted a tree in the courtyard of our building.
2. Scene describing the savings account booklet I found in the box in the small closet, and how I succeeded in collecting the money when I returned to France for the first time, after ten years in America.
3. Scene describing how I once stole a ring in a department store.
4. Scene describing how after school with the other boys from our neighborhood we played soccer in the street, not with a soccer ball, but with a little wooden palette that would demolish our shoes, which made my mother very unhappy because she could not afford to buy me new shoes. In fact, concerning shoes, I had to wait until my cousin Salomon’s shoes became too small for him, to be handed down to me by my aunt Marie. But these used shoes were already too small for me because, even though I was younger than my cousin Salomon, my feet were bigger than his. I suppose, there is nothing much more that can be said about that.
5. Scene describing how mean one of the teachers in school had been, and how he would throw a metal ruler at us if we spoke in class, and how when he came back from the war he had lost a leg, and he was not as mean, and how we would laugh when we saw him walk with only one leg and his crutches. We would call him le boiteux.
6. Scene describing how one day when I went to my cousin Salomon, to ask him to help me with my algebra homework, he tried to force me to suck his cock.
7. Scene describing how, one day, when I was playing doctor with my sister Jacqueline, we almost got caught by my mother. It was the day war was declared.
8. Scene describing how my cousin Salomon, one day, when we were playing in the street in front of our house, tied me with a rope down in a ditch some workers had dug in the street, and how he shoved a handkerchief in my mouth so I couldn’t shout, and how I couldn’t untie myself and answer my mother when she called out from the window of our apartment for me to come home because it was starting to get dark.
9. Scene describing the Exodus at the beginning of the war, and how all the people left Paris as the German soldiers approached the city, and how my parents and sisters and me, we walked carrying suitcases on the roads of Normandy with thousands of other people, and how we saw French soldiers in retreat, and also how we saw dead people when the enemy airplanes fired at us with machine guns.
10. Scene describing how we wandered for days on the roads of Normandy, and how when we arrived in Argentan the Germans were already there, and how I was impressed with their uniforms, especially the officers’ uniforms.
11. Scene describing the house in Argentan in which the Germans put us, and where we stayed for almost a year, and how my mother would fix the German soldier’s uniforms, do their laundry, press their shirts, and how my father would get stuff from the black market for the German soldiers, and how they would bring us food, and how in the evening German soldiers came to our house to discuss politics with my father, and how I would go to the store to buy bottles of beer for the German soldiers, and how before leaving late in the evening, they would all raise their left fist and together with my father they would sing the International, and me too, I would sing with them in a soft voice. The German soldiers who came to our house were all Communists, like my father. My father explained to me that the best place for German Communists to hide was in the army.
12. Scene demonstrating how verisimilitude often becomes improbable when one tells a story.
13. Scene describing the Argentan Lycée where I got my certificat d’études, and how the boys used to fight with chestnuts that fell from the trees that surrounded the school playground, and how I would also throw chestnuts at them.
14. Scene describing how, during the very cold winter we spent in Argentan, one day the German soldiers who came to discuss politics with my father unloaded a whole truck of coal in front of our house, and how all the neighbors were saying that we were collaborators.
15. Scene describing how the children in Argentan played on the big square in front of the church where the Germans had piled up the gas masks and the rifles and the helmets abandoned by the retreating French army.
16. Explain how, when the war started, all the people in the cities had to carry a gas mask everywhere they went. Even the children.
17. Scene describing the night when the tannery in front of our house caught fire, and how all the people in our street had to be evacuated, and how the firemen fought the fire, and how I wished our house would also burn so we could move away from this neighborhood.
18. Describe how, after the burnt factory had been completely demolished, we had a view of the whole city from the window of our apartment on the third floor.
19. Describe the wasteland— La Zone, as it was called—between Porte D’Orléans and Montrouge, and how the Arabs from the colonies, we called them Les Sidis, slept in this no-man’s land in cardboard boxes or wrapped in newspapers, and how the people who had to cross the Zone to get home were scared of them.
20. Scene revealing how I masturbated in my bed or in the hot house in the courtyard, and how once my mother caught me doing it, and told me that if I continued to do that I would become blind.
21. Scene describing how at the beginning of the war, before the Germans arrived in Paris, during a bombardment alert, my father and I stood at the open window of our apartment to watch the German planes bombard the Renault factory in Malakoff. It was like the fireworks on Bastille day. My mother, before going down to the shelter with my sisters, and the other people in the building, shouted at my father to go down to the shelter, but my father refused, and I was proud to stay with him during the entire alert.
22. Describe how on Sunday, my mother, my sisters, and I would walk from Montrouge all the way to Rue Vercingétorix in the 14th arrondissement, to have lunch at my grandmother’s with the aunts, uncles, and cousins, and how my sisters and I always complained that it was too far to go, and that we should take the subway or the autobus, because our feet hurt, and how my mother would tell us we could not afford the metro or the autobus, and how my father never came with us on Sunday because everybody in my mother’s side of the family hated him.
23. Tell how whe
n we walked home to Montrouge after the visit to my grandmother’s, we always went before it was dark because we were afraid of the Sidis in the Zone.
24. Tell how, when I was old enough to take the subway alone to go visit my aunts on my father’s side and play with their children who lived in the Jewish neighborhood of Le Marais, I would make a detour to Rue St. Denis to look at the prostitutes standing in the street.
25. Tell how I always dreamt of becoming a great adventurer. An explorer. Or else a stowaway on a pirate ship. I also dreamt of being able to fly.
26. Tell how once my mother bought me un éclair au chocolat for my birthday.
27. Tell how I liked to go to the open market with my mother to do the food shopping.
28. Describe how the man who delivered the coal for the building where we lived dropped it from his truck in the street, and how my uncle Leon would make me carry it to the cellar with a big pail.
29. Describe how I would sneak into the Montrouge cinema, Place de la République, to see the Charlie Chaplin movies.
30. Describe how Yvette, the pretty young woman who lived on the same floor we did, one day asked me, when I was only eight years old, to come to her place to show me how to make myself feel good.
31. Tell about the stolen spoon.
32. Describe how my father used to take me with him to Place de la Bastille to demonstrate with the Communists against the government, and how we all sang the International, and how one day the police dispersed us by striking us with their sticks, and how my father got hit on the head and was bleeding, and how he wiped the blood with my handkerchief, and how my mother screamed when she saw the blood on my handkerchief, and how she told my father that he should never take me again, that he was trying to have me killed, and how I loved those demonstrations.
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