Shhh

by Raymond Federman

  Not far from where the train stopped we come upon an old abandoned barn in the middle of a field. We settle in.

  One of the young men goes out to see if he can find something to eat. He comes back with some raw potatoes and turnips. That’s all he could find. We rub the dirt from these and eat them raw. If no one comes to the barn in the morning, we’ll stay there all day, and then at night we’ll walk to the Vierzon station to study the situation. Hopefully in the morning we can find some better food in the fields. Maybe even some fruit. After having eaten the potatoes and turnips, I fall asleep on a pile of hay.

  We remained hidden in the barn the entire following day. No one came. One of us stood guard, while the other two slept.

  The young man who found the potatoes and turnips went back out into the fields looking for more food. This time he came back with some carrots and peaches. He also said that not far from the barn there was a little stream. The three of us went there to drink some fresh water and wash our faces.

  I was already starting to forget what happened these past few days. Everything seemed to have vanished from my mind. I

  felt protected by these two young men. I hadn’t told them that I had decided to go all the way to Africa with them, but already I saw myself fighting with De Gaulle’s free forces. Even if I was only a boy, I could be useful. I would be like a mascot.

  Having fought many battles with my tin soldiers, maybe General de Gaulle might even let me carry a rifle to fight in the war against the Germans.

  About 1:00 a.m. in the middle of the night, on July 20th, after having walked the ten kilometers to Vierzon, one of the young men goes to scout the situation at the train station, while the other young man and I stay hidden in a ditch.

  From where we are we can see what is going on at the station. Workers are loading freight trains while being watched by German soldiers.

  About 1:15 a.m. the young man comes back and tells us that it will not be easy. There are too many soldiers everywhere inspecting all the trains. He doesn’t think we can get on a train tonight. We’ll try again tomorrow.

  We go back to the old abandoned barn, and spend the entire day there. To be sure that no one comes, again one of us stands guard while the other two sleep. I take my turn. I already feel like a real soldier. When it’s night we walk again to the Vierzon station.

  It’s about 3:00 a.m. in the morning on July 21st. We’ve been observing the station for a long time. Like the night before workers are busy loading material on freight trains watched by German soldiers. It would be too dangerous to try to get on one of these trains tonight, even after it’s loaded. We’ll have to come back tomorrow. Maybe it won’t be so busy. Or we’ll have to find another way to cross into the free zone.

  We are about to go back to our refuge when suddenly we hear loud sirens, and we see all the workers and the soldiers too run in the same direction. All the lights go out. What a stroke of luck, the young men say. It’s an alert. They’re all going to the bomb shelters. There must be British planes coming. Let’s go. We jump out of the ditch where we were hiding and run towards the train that the workers were loading. We see other people carrying suitcases also running towards the train. They were hiding in a shack in the middle of the tracks. These were people who had payed the passeurs to get across the line of demarcation. We climb into one of the cars.

  About 3:20 a.m., same night, we hear the sirens again. The workers and soldiers come out of the shelters. It seems that it was a false alert. Or maybe it was a fake alert to allow the people who had payed the passeurs to get on the train. In any case, we have made it too.

  The car in which we are hiding is full of bales of wire. We hear voices outside, but since this car was already inspected we feel safe. The door on the side of the platform is already closed.

  About 3:30 a.m. on July 21st, the train starts rolling. Five minutes later, one of the young men slides the door of the car open and says, we are in La Zone Libre. The three of us stand at the door looking out, the wind blowing in our faces. The train is now going full speed. The smoke of the engine fills our car.

  The two young men keep consulting their maps each time the train speeds past a sleepy train station. Several hours later one of them exclaims we are in le Lot-et-Garonne, just past Bergerac. The Lotet-Garonne, I exclaim. I have an uncle who lives in this part of the country.

  I tell them that my uncle Maurice, who was called into the army when the war started, was in the Dunkirk debacle, and after he escaped from the German army he took refuge in the free zone in a little town called Montflanquin.

  They ask me how I know that. I explain that my uncle Leon and my aunt Marie, a sister of my mother, who lived in the same building with us, often told the story of how my uncle Maurice escaped and took refuge in Montflanquin where his wife Nenette managed to join him by paying some passeur to get across the line of demarcation. I am almost sure that this is also where my uncles and aunts who left before La Grande Rafle must be. In fact, they were there still alive, I discovered when I finally made it to Montflanquin.

  I tell the young men that I think I’m going to jump off the train and try to find my family. So they look on their map to find Montflanquin, but they can’t. Doesn’t matter, I tell them. I’m going to jump here anyway. I am sure I can find that town, and my uncles and aunts will take care of me. The Lot-et-Garonne mustn’t be too big. And maybe I’ll be lucky and jump not too far from Montflanquin.

  About 6:00 a.m. on July 21, 1942, when the train slowed down around a sharp curve, I said goodbye to my two friends and jumped from the train. I landed in a deep muddy ditch. When I climbed out of that ditch I was all muddied. I had hurt my knee. And my nose was bleeding. But I was still alive.

  The rest of this story is told in Return to Manure. As for the great adventures I could have had in Africa with these two young men, they were now all but forgotten.

  Well, that’s the story of those few days of wandering during which my childhood vanished behind me. At least, that’s what I’m able to reconstruct from the holes in my memory. Perhaps next time I’ll remember another version.

  Federman when will you finally tell the real story of what happened to you after you came out of the closet. All that sounds so invented.

  It is invented. Well, it’s re-invented. It had to be. Do you think that I lived all my life preserving the details of this adventure.

  The only thing I know for sure is that soon after my arrival in Montflanquin, I started working on a farm. I admit that how I got there still remains blurry in my mind.

  Federman, to tell one’s childhood, one’s life, demands an honest participation with memory. The stories you are telling, even if you deform them, are souvenirs that you have kept in you. Don’t you feel a sense of responsibility towards them? Don’t you feel responsible for their veracity?

  Don’t come and bug me with this question of responsibility and of duty to memory. Le devoir à la mémoire.

  Me, totally amoral as I am, lost in my head, me who should have changed tense a long time ago, how can I be responsible towards what I write? What do I owe to memory?

  Responsible writing is always false, because responsibility is a lie. One believes oneself responsible, but in fact one is only pretending to be.

  Those who exterminated my family believe themselves to be responsible for cleansing humanity of a vermin—Ungeziefer.

  And why should one have a sense of duty towards one’s souvenirs? As if one owes them something. A tax. A debt that must be repaid.

  To remember is to play a mental cinema that falsifies the original event. Souvenirs are fiction.

  When I write, I don’t give a damn about what I owe to memory. Otherwise it would mean that I write to repay what I owe to those who forced me to write. What do I owe them?

  Those who have read me up to now will say, he owes his life to his mother. His duty is to repay her.

  Yes, that’s true. But this mass of words I have left behind, in English, French, Charabia, tha
t’s my recompense to her. I have written all that for her, in order to decode the great silence she imposed on me with her CHUT.

  My duty, if I must have one, is to fill the hole of absence that my mother dug into me. My duty is to render her absence present. And thus give a little dignity to those whose lives were humiliated.

  So now on with the story in Montrouge.

  One night, it was winter, we were still all asleep, when suddenly we hear fire engine sirens in the street, and the Pin Pon of police cars.

  My mother gets up and rushes to the window and shouts, the factory across the street is on fire! My father goes to the window to see. And me too. I squeeze my head between them to look. I see the flames coming out of the windows of the factory and the smoke rising into the sky. Even the trees in front of the factory are burning. People are in the street looking at the firemen who are starting to fight with the fire with long water hoses. The whole scene looks beautiful. It’s like a scene in a story. That’s what I thought when I saw the fire.

  My mother anxiously says, it’s dangerous, the fire could cross the street. Come on children get dressed quickly, we have to go down. At that very moment a knock on the door. My father opens it. A policeman tells us that we must evacuate immediately. The fire is spreading in the street from the factory.

  My mother takes out a suitcase from the closet to put things in it. The policeman tells her there is no time for that. We must go down immediately before it’s too late. When I hear that, I see myself surrounded by fire. I must cross the fire if I want to survive. My sisters and I are not yet fully dressed. I must cross this fire, I’m thinking while getting dressed. You don’t have time to finish getting dressed, the policeman says. Just grab your clothes and you’ll get dressed in the street. Take blankets with you because it’s very cold outside. We don’t know yet where we’re going to put all the people who are being evacuated.

  Mother opens the drawer of the buffet to take her precious silverware, but the policeman tells her leave all that. But she manages to slip it all in a little bag as the policeman pulls her by the arm towards the door.

  Father has put on his overcoat over his pyjamas, also a hat, and a long scarf around his neck.

  We are rushing now down the dark stairs, each with a blanket over our shoulders.

  In front of us in the stairs Leon, Marie and Salomon are also going down. Leon is wearing his robe de chambre and he has a little satchel in his hand. Probably full of the money he hides under the mattress of his bed.

  In the street policemen and gendarmes are urging the people to move away from the raging fire. There is heavy smoke everywhere burning our eyes and making us cough. The firemen are hurling water on the fire with their long hoses, but the flames are spreading to the buildings next to the factory.

  A police officer on a horse tells the people with a megaphone that they must immediately go take refuge in the school on Rue de Bagneux. My school. Many people resist. They want to see if their homes are going to burn. But the policemen and the gendarmes are forcing them to retreat. The smoke is now unbearable. While walking quickly towards the school, my mother is pulling me by the hand. I would like to stay to see what will happen when all the houses in the street burn. I see myself in another scene. I am lost in a big dark cloud of smoke which I must cross to reach where I am going. Stop dragging your feet, my mother says, the fire is catching us.

  My sisters are running in front of us holding hands. My father is somewhere behind us.

  I look at all that like a great adventure. I would like our house to burn, this way we could go live somewhere else.

  We are now in the school. Ladies with Red Cross uniforms are organizing things. They put groups of people in different rooms. They give coffee to the people and milk to the children.

  Our street, Rue Louis Rolland, is now closed at both ends.

  Late in the afternoon, le commissaire de police de Montrouge comes to the school and tells the assembled refugees that even though the fire is almost completely controlled, no one is allowed to go back home because of the heavy smoke still lingering in the air.

  So we have to stay in the school overnight. Merchants from the neighborhood bring food for the people who have been evacuated.

  My mother manages to get us double portions of everything because, she tells the people distributing the food, the children have not eaten in two days.

  A rumor is circulating that it was the Sidis who set the factory on fire because they were forced to work in such a filthy smelly place. It’s true that the terrible stench of the cow hides being remade into leather had disappeared with the fire.

  For weeks after the fire was finally extinguished, workers continued to demolish and remove the ruins of the factory. When it was all cleared up, from the windows of our apartment we could see the entire city of Montrouge. It made me feel free. It made me feel like I could fly away. I would open the window and lean way out over the edge, my arms extended like wings and I would pretend that I was flying into the sky. My mother would scream at me, Stop that, you’re going to fall. Move back from the window.

  That’s how the factory in front of our house disappeared. After that, the people were saying that the neighborhood had become less dangerous now that the Sidis were no longer working here. In the evening people would walk in the street without fear, and...

  Federman, did you just make up this whole thing about the fire just so that you could tell us a little adventure story.

  No, the fire really happened. And it’s true about the view.

  But the following year big ugly apartment buildings were built there, and the view disappeared. Just like that.

  Just like that. But my imagining flying out of the window, that was a happy moment.

  Oh, I have to tell something else that happened in our neighborhood. Something funny.

  One day, or rather one night, Marius’s café at the corner of the street was burglarized. It was a big café, with an old zinc bar, and a billiard table in the back. Children were not allowed to go into the café. Except when their parents sent them to by cigarettes. This bistrot was for adults who came after work to have a few drinks, and often remained late into the night and would stagger home totally drunk.

  The next morning, a Sunday, three police cars arrived full speed with their blaring Pin Pon Pin Pon and stopped in front of the café. Everybody in the neighborhood rushed to see what was happening. The policemen explained that during the night burglars broke a window to get into the café, and stole a lot of bottles of liquor, and even some money.

  During the burglary, one of the thieves relieved himself on the billiard table. When Marius arrived early in the morning and saw that big load in the middle of his billiard table he almost fainted. But when the policemen saw that, they all laughed, and soon after all the people in the neighborhood knew what had happened, and wanted to see that big pile on Marius’ billiard table. People lined up outside the café, and there was such a crowd the policemen had to direct traffic.

  They would allow only a dozen people at a time to enter. Outside in the street, people were pushing and shoving like mad to get in. Without the police it would have been a real riot. The policemen kept shouting, Calm down, everybody will get a chance to see. Move along, move along, they would say to the people around the table. A little faster. Don’t be selfish. Let the others see. Some people were taking pictures. That day even children were allowed into Marius’s café.

  Even I went to see, but my sisters refused to go. They said it was disgusting to go see something like that.

  Poor Marius. He looked so ashamed. He was sitting at a table in the corner of the café, his head between his hands. He looked like he was crying.

  That pile of shit on his billiard table bugged him for the rest of his life. When people came into the café they would ask, Marius how is your big turd? What did you do with it? Did you cook it? Marius became neurasthenic because of this burglary, and barely talked to anyone.

  Well, that’s en
ough for that, now I’ll tell something else. But before going any further with my stories, I have to decide whether or not I should put here what I wrote to Francesca, a young Italian graduate student who is writing a doctoral dissertation about the bilingual aspect of my work, who asked in a letter how the book I am writing is going, and in which language it is being written.

  I don’t know if I should put my reply here, in the pages reserved for stories, or in the separate pages of commentaries and arguments.

  Well, I’ll put it here, I can always displace it later.

  Dear Francesca,

  I’m on page 217 of a novel I’m writing in English. It’s called Shhh: The Story of a Childhood.

  I say novel, but is it really a novel, in the traditional sense of that word? What I’m writing has no plot. No suspense. No possibility of a resolution. Let’s just say that I’m telling stories.

  I’m telling, in my usual way, the story of my childhood. The thirteen years that preceded the adventure of the closet.

  I say telling, or rather I should say, I’m reconstructing with words what I believe my childhood to have been.

  I’m reinventing most of it. I do so, without any respect for chronology, with debris of souvenirs, and fragments of stories I’ve already told elsewhere. I also do it by inserting poems, mini-stories, quotations, digressions into the text.

  I’m telling this childhood in the first person, in a tone perhaps a bit too serious for me. It’s dangerous, because such a tone can easily lead to sentimentality.

  Fortunately, voices constantly interrupt the narrative by addressing Federman— that’s the name of the storyteller—warning him to avoid agonizing realism and decadent lyricism, and especially not to exaggerate too much.