Shhh

by Raymond Federman

  I told earlier about the cardboard box I found in the bedroom closet, and that there were photos in it. A photo of my sisters and me when we were little. The only photo I have of them. And a photo of my parents. Their wedding photo, I think. A few photos of my father. He liked to be photographed. One of these is of him as a young man. It shows how handsome he was.

  That photo is half torn, but that’s the one I like best because it has a kind of symbolic meaning for me. How my father was torn from life. There is also a photo of my maternal grandmother seated with my cousin Salomon as a baby on her lap, and standing on one side of her, my aunt Marie in a beautiful flowered dress, and on the other side my mother wearing an ugly black dress that went all the way down to her ankles. It must have been the dress she had to wear in the orphanage. I suppose that once in a while my mother was allowed to leave the orphanage to visit her family.

  Did I forget to mention that my mother was raised in an orphanage?

  For details about the reason why my Mother spent some ten years in an orphanage after her father died in 1910, in a flood, see pages 140- 141 of Aunt Rachel’s Fur.

  Besides these photos, which I took with me to America, I found two photos of two different women I could not recognize. Both were very beautiful and elegantly dressed. They were not my aunts. As far as I can remember, I had never seen these women.

  One is leaning against a curtain in a provocative pose. The other is seated at a table her legs crossed.

  The photos are postcards, the kind that were fashionable at that time. I don’t know why, but I kept these two photos.

  On the back of the photo of the woman standing by the curtain is written: En me regardant pensez que je pense tout le temps à vous. And it is signed, Léa.

  I’ll translate. While looking at me, think that I think of you all the time.

  On the back of the other photo of the beautiful lady sitting at the table is written: Caresses, Pauline.

  I don’t think I need to translate.

  While I don’t want to draw any conclusions on the basis of these two photos, they do seem to confirm what my aunts were saying about my father, that he was a womanizer.

  My aunts also said that my father was a gambler. That instead of working, he spent his time at the race track, or in cafes playing cards for money.

  It’s true that my father was not home very often, and when he was there it was to argue with my mother, usually about money, or with the rest of the family, because besides everything else, as I have already told, my father was a fanatic of politics, and he always argued with everybody about politics. Especially with Leon.

  My father was on the left, whereas Leon was on the right. Which is normal since Leon was rich. Rich people are always on the right. My father was a Trotskyist, or perhaps I should say, an anarchist, and he was always broke. That’s why my poor mother had to clean houses for other people so that she could feed her children.

  In our house, bread was sacred. If by accident my sisters or I dropped a piece of bread on the floor, we had to pick it up immediately and kiss it. It’s Maman who taught us that. Also, if we put a loaf of bread on the table upside down, we had to turn it over immediately, because Maman told to us that’s it brings bad luck.

  When my sisters and I were still very young there was a big economic crisis in France, and because we were poor our mother would take us to the soup kitchen. She was so ashamed to have to take us there. My sisters and I didn’t mind. We even had fun standing in line with the other poor people of the neighborhood.

  I wrote this poem describing how we stood in line at la soupe populaire, and how ...

  OK, go ahead Federman, stick another one of your old poems here. If your publisher doesn’t like it, he can always take it out before publishing the book.

  Personally, I believe that my poems, especially those about my mother and father add a personal and emotional dimension to what I am writing about my childhood.

  So, I’m not going to ask permission, I’ll put my poems where I think they should be.

  The Soup Kitchen

  when we stood in line

  at the soup kitchen

  while our father

  was losing our food

  at the race track

  betting on the wrong horse

  my mother would pull the collar

  of her coat up around her face

  to hide her shame

  but we the children

  my sisters and I

  we thought it was fun

  to stand in line

  at the soup kitchen

  we would play games

  counting the number of people

  before us and behind us

  also because we were growing children

  we would always get a little extra food

  and even our mother would give us

  the food from her metal container

  saying that she was not hungry

  You know, Federman, with all this back and forth, and these poems, and digressions, and detours, your publisher is going to tell you to go take a walk. You can’t just shove anything you want anywhere in your story. Your publisher is going to object.

  Mister Federman, that’s not what we expected from you, he will tell you. How can our readers follow what you are writing if in the middle of a story you start another story without finishing the one you were telling? We were hoping for something more readable, more accessible from you. Something less incoherent. Less surfictional. And also all those references to your other books will certainly affect the sale of this one.

  Yes, I know that I never manage to get to the end of what I am telling, but that’s because now that I have, so to speak, fallen back into childhood, everything gets crowded in my head.

  When children tell a story they say anything that comes to their minds in any old way, and in so doing, they poeticize without realizing it.

  Well, that’s how I want to tell my childhood. In a kind of poetic disorder. After all, my childhood was pure chaos, incoherence, and incomprehension. And on top of that starvation. Or what the French call, crève la faim.

  Ah, crève la faim! How many times during my childhood did I tell my mother, Maman I’m still hungry. And my mother would say, Tell that to your father, while sliding from her plate into mine the rest of her food.

  Tell that to your father, she would say. My father who was losing the grocery money at the race track in Auteuil or at the Café Métropole, Porte d’Orléans, where he spent most of his time playing cards with his friends. All of them foreigners, Communists. I know because often my mother would send me to the Café Métropole to tell my father to come home.

  Federman, stop! Stop! We just wanted to warn you that the way you’re telling this story may not be what your publisher is expecting. And here you go jumping into another story about your father and his gambling.

  This is not the place for that. These pages, these special pages in italics are reserved for comments and reflections about the way you’re telling your childhood.

  Then in this case, I’ll go back to the regular pages, the pages of the stories, and I’ll go on with what I was saying.

  I really never knew my father. He was a stranger, even at home. How then can I describe this stranger who accepted to live with us? How to recognize him? That inexplicable man absent from the world. How to thank him for having given me his name to contemplate, to preserve, to surpass?

  It’s possible that the marriage of my father to my mother was arranged. As I said my mother was raised in an orphanage. And I understand that when young women left the orphanage they were given a small dowry, and in some cases a husband was found for them. Well, that’s what I’ve heard.

  The orphanage was called La Maison Rothschild. As the name suggests, it was a Jewish orphanage. My mother once showed me where it was in le douzième arrondissement. I don’t remember why my mother and I were in that neighborhood. We were walking past a tall wall and my mother said to me, You see, behind this wal
l, that’s where I spent most of my childhood, until I was old enough to be on my own. Your uncle Maurice and your aunt Rachel where there too. It was then an orphanage.

  In those days, it was not unusual for Jewish marriages to be arranged. It was a time when many Jews from Eastern Europe were emigrating to France, many of them illegally. My father had just arrived from Poland without any papers, probably broke, and the orphanage found a Jewish husband for my mother who was still unmarried at the age of twenty-four. He was two years younger than her.

  In any case, that’s my hypothesis, the reason why my mother married a man who made her so unhappy all the time.

  It’s true that my mother was not beautiful. But she was a saint, as her sisters always said, because she endured this bastard of a husband, and sacrificed herself for her children. True, my mother was not very good-looking. She was short. Had a prominent nose, like mine. And she was crossed-eye. She wore spectacles all the time. Her hair was messy. She never used make-up. And she was always poorly dressed. Most of her clothes came from her sisters after they were used or no longer in style. But my mother was a saint.

  I will not try to justify my father’s conduct. I simply say how it was. Papa for me has become a mythical being. At least, that’s how I imagine him. How I’ve reinvented him.

  When I think of him, I see him in a cloud of cigarette smoke in the back of the Métropole café, playing cards with his foreign friends.

  Often my mother would send me to the Métropole to tell Papa to come home for dinner. It was a ten minute walk each way to Porte d’Orléans. I was well known at the Métropole. My father’s friends would kid me when they saw me arrive. Ah, here is Schimele-Bubkes-Zinn who comes to get Papa.

  Schimele-Bubkes-Zinn, the little piece-of-shit-son of Simon. That’s what they always called me.

  My father would say, Wait till we finish this game and I’ll come with you. So I would sit on a chair next to the table where he was playing and watch the game. That’s how I learned to play belote, and I too became a gambler. I think in English this game is called klaberjass, or something like that.

  I must tell how, in the afternoon, after I finished my homework, and managed to slip past Leon’s atelier to play in the street, my school friend Robert Laurent and I would sit on the edge of the sidewalk and play belote. We did that almost every day. Sometimes he would win, and other times it was my turn.

  I don’t know why, but I have never forgotten Robert Laurent’s name. Not so with the names of the other boys in school. They have all been forgotten. But not his name.

  Oh, I know now why I haven’t forgotten Robert Laurent’s name. Or rather Bébert’s as everyone called him.

  Bébert was timid like me, so he didn’t have many friends. That’s why we played together.

  My uncle Leon used to say that Bébert’s parents were anti-Semites, and that I shouldn’t play with him.

  But we got along well, Bébert and me. Not only did we play cards together, but we also went swimming together.We were both members of a swimming club called L’Amicale de Natation. Every Thursday we would go practice with the team in the municipal swimming pool, rue Saillard near Denfert Rochereau. We had races against other clubs, and I even won some medals. I specialized in the backstroke, and Bébert in the butterfly. We also swam relays together.

  I became a pretty good swimmer when I was a boy. Later, when I went to America I swam for Northern High School in Detroit, and then for Wayne University. In 1948, I almost qualified for the Olympic team. I’m not kidding. For more details about that see Take It or Leave It.

  I should tell how Bébert and I became members of L’Amicale de Natation. It’s a funny story. We were still very young when we began swimming. We were hardly ...

  And here goes Federman, launching once again into another detour.

  I can’t prevent myself. A word, a name from my childhood comes to me, like the name Bébert, and paff, here I go! Another story gets going.

  So are you going to tell us how you became a swimmer now, or you are going to postpone that for later?

  Alright, I’ll tell about swimming now. But first I still have to tell why I have never forgotten the name Robert Laurent.

  It’s because the day I went to school for the first time with the yellow star on my clothes, that day, when I asked Bébert if we were going to play belote after school, he said, No, my parents told me I can’t play with you any more, I can’t talk to you any more.

  That’s what Robert Laurent said to me in 1942. It was as if I had suddenly become a pariah because of the yellow star on my chest. As if I had a contagious disease.

  I suppose, that’s a good enough reason for not having forgotten his name. But there is a better one also.

  When I returned to France for the first time, after having spent some ten years in America, one day, by chance, I stumble on Bébert. It was in a Montparnasse café. I was sitting there alone. I see Bébert enter the café and I recognize him immediately. And he recognizes me. We were both almost thirty years old now, but still looking the same. Without my inviting him, he comes over to my table and sits down. Even offers to buy me a drink. So we talk. Or rather he talks. He tells me he knows what happened to my family during the war, and he’s really sorry. He tells me how he became champion of France in the butterfly when he was twenty years old. But now he no longer swims. He tells me he still lives with his parents in Montrouge, in the same building, and that he works in a factory where they make tubes for toothpaste. It’s a boring job, but he makes a decent living. He would like to get married, but has not yet found the right gonzesse, the right broad.

  I smile when he says gonzesse. A good slang word I oftren used when I was living in France.

  He goes on and on. I listen. I don’t say much about myself when he asks what I’m doing. Except to tell him that I now live in America. And that I am a writer. What else could I tell him.

  He doesn’t seem interested in what I have become.

  At that time, even though I had lived a rather chaotic life since the day I came out of the closet, done many crazy things, I hadn’t accomplished much. For three years I worked on a farm in southern France before leaving for America. And there I worked in Detroit, and I was jazz musician, a dishwasher in New York, a waiter in a country club in the Catskills, I jumped out of airplanes with the 82nd Airborne Division in North Carolina, fought the war in Korea, did a lot of screwing with cute Japanese girls in Tokyo, went to Columbia on the G.I. Bill, and yet in spite of all that there was little to tell. Now I was just a graduate student at UCLA working on a Ph.D. Doing a lot of reading. Le nouveau roman. Beckett. Writing a little. Mostly poetry. I started a novel which was not going very well. I hadn’t published anything. At thirty, I felt like a failure.

  I didn’t tell Bébert all that. I was only thinking about it while he went on telling me about his mediocre life. I let him talk. I was impatient for him to leave.

  Finally as he stood up to leave, he said to me, Why don’t you come for dinner one evening, in spite of it all.

  He said it in French of course. Viens quande même dîner chez nous un soir.

  I don’t know why, but I said, Yes, that would be nice. It was, I suppose, his quand même that made me accept his invitation. Let’s say that I was curious to see how anti-Semites lived now.

  And besides that it’ll give me a chance to see the old neighborhood.

  Come this weekend, he said, as he waved au revoir.

  So the following Saturday, I arrive at Bébert’s parents. Same old building, on my street, rue Louis Rolland. I’m greeted warmly. As if I were an old friend of the family. Bébert’s mother even kisses me on both cheeks. His father shakes my hand vigorously. Before sitting at the table for dinner we talk. I am asked what kind of work I do, what kind of writing, how it is to live in America, if I’m doing ok over there. Just banal conversation. We avoid talking about what happened during the war. I am wondering why I decided to come.

  Bébert’s mother goes back and f
orth between the dining room and the kitchen where she’s preparing dinner, finally she brings out a big soupière, puts it on the table and says, Dinner is served, let’s eat before the soup gets cold.

  I am sitting next to Bébert facing his mother. She tells me to serve myself. I fill my plate with what looks and smells delicious. I love split pea soup, I tell Bébert’s mother. As I reach for my soup spoon, I notice the initials carved on the handle. It’s a silver spoon. I look at it.

  M.F. These are the initials on that spoon. And suddenly I realize that I am holding in my hand a silver spoon that belonged to my mother. Yes, my mother had a set of silverware with her initials. I believe it was a gift from her sisters when she got married. We never used that silverware. It stayed in a drawer of the buffet wrapped in newspaper. Whenever my mother complained to my father that she didn’t have enough money to buy food, my father would threaten to take the silverware to a pawn shop.

  My mother would stand in front of the buffet to protect her silverware, and start crying. So my father would not insist. I think he respected my mother’s personal treasure.

  I remained seated at the table for a moment, my hand holding the spoon before my face, my eyes fixed on it. Then I put it down slowly on the table. Got up. I didn’t say anything. They all had lowered their heads over their soup. I stood by the door a moment, looking at them, and then I left. I felt a heavy silence behind the door. I was not going to ask them to give me back the spoon, and whatever else they had stolen from us. I can still see Madame Laurent’s face when I held the spoon before my eyes staring at the initials. She looked as if she was ready to burst into tears or choke with sobs. She was all flushed. Monsieur Laurent just kept his head down, he started eating his soup. Bébert attempted to rise from his chair as if he wanted to reach for me, but he froze there.