Shhh

by Raymond Federman

  I’m not doing realism, I’m just staging the scene I’m going to relate. I know that descriptions are boring, but from time to time they are necessary. Otherwise you’re going to say that what I’m writing is not fiction. So I’m describing the decor.

  And now Federman takes himself for a theater director. Well, well.

  To tell a story always demands some staging, and this one is like a little drama.

  So, I continue.

  In spite of the heat and the humidity, this farm is an ideal setting for a vacation. All the children are outside playing, some on the swings, others running around in the meadow, some plucking wild berries along the hedgerows, others chasing the chickens in the farm yard or climbing up the trees.

  Raymond and Jacqueline are not outside with the other children, they are playing in the barn. The game they are playing must be funny because one can hear them chuckle. They are playing doctor. Raymond is the doctor examining the anatomy of his little sister. They are both laughing happily. Jacqueline is eight years old, Raymond ten.

  Their sister Sarah is not playing with them. She is not in this scene. She will be later. And also their mother. Sarah thinks of herself too grown up to play with them. Especially your stupid games, she tells them. She is sitting in the shadow of a tree reading. She’s always reading books she never shows to her brother and sister. Today, if she was still alive, she would certainly be a poet.

  So Raymond and Jacqueline are playing doctor in the barn when, after a long journey from Montrouge, their mother arrives in the late afternoon. When she learned that war had been declared, she immediately left to take her children home. Maman was a real mère poule always protecting her little chicks. Especially her little poussin Raymond.

  Before going on, I must make a correction concerning the date. The scene I am describing did not take place the day war was declared, but the next day, because Maman could not have traveled from Paris to the farm in le Poitou the very day war was declared.

  The French declared war on Germany at 5:00 p.m. September 3rd. I know this because once I had to verify the exact date and time for something I was writing.

  Because the war was declared so late in the day, Maman must have come to fetch us the next day to bring us home, where Papa was waiting. She was worried. She wanted to protect us.

  It must have taken her almost a full day to come from Montrouge because first she would have had to catch a train and travel for several hours from Paris to Poitiers, then take a bus to the little village near where the farm was located, and then walk to the farm, and ...

  Federman, you would do anything to delay telling us what happened that day with you sister. Are you ashamed to tell us?

  No, I’m not ashamed. Besides, I’m not going to go into the details of what Raymond and Jacqueline were doing. I simply want to say as much as possible about my sisters. So I’m adding details to make this moment with my sisters last longer.

  I don’t remember the name of the village, but it’s not important. In any case, I am sure now that what I am about to tell happened on September 4th. The day after the declaration of war.

  So here is Maman arriving at the farm late in the afternoon after a long journey. Still breathing heavily from the long walk on a dirt road from the village to the farm, she worriedly asks the farm lady where her children are. The farm lady tells her that the two young ones are playing in the barn with the cows. They love the animals so much. The older one is so serious. She must be somewhere reading a book. She loves to read. She’ll surely be a school teacher when she grows up.

  As I already indicated, the door of the barn is open. In the semidarkness one can barely see the cows and the horses. The dust is still whirling in the fading sun rays. Jacqueline is lying on the hay in a dark corner of the barn, her skirt pulled up. She is being examined by Doctor Raymond. Jacqueline is chuckling gently.

  Outside one can hear the noise of the children chasing the chickens in the farm yard.

  Suddenly Maman appears in the entrance of the barn looking intensely into the darkness. She calls out, Raymond! Jacqueline! Are you in there, children?

  Raymond and Jacqueline jump to their feet and together, with a voice full of surprise and apprehension they call back, Yes, we’re here, and they emerge from the corner where they were playing brushing the hay from their clothes.

  —What were you doing there? Maman asks.

  —Nothing. We were just playing a game, Raymond and Jacqueline answer.

  —What kind of game?

  —We were looking for something in the hay.

  —What sort of something?

  —A little thing Jacqueline lost, Raymond explains.

  —What little thing?

  Suddenly Sarah appears in the barn. She’s now in the scene. With an ugly sneer, she points to Raymond and Jacqueline, and says, They were playing doctor. Raymond was playing with Jacqueline’s little thing.

  Raymond and Jacqueline are trembling with fear. But Maman doesn’t scold them. She says nothing. Then she puts her arms around the three children. There are tears in her eyes when she says, We are at war. I’m taking you home. Papa is waiting for us.

  We are at war, she repeats, holding us tighter in her arms. Then she lets go of us and tells us to get our things. We can still catch the bus and the last train to Paris. Maman is not crying any more. She’s ...

  Federman, so you were already a little pervert when you were a boy. Weren’t you ashamed to play with your sister’s thing?

  Not really. All little boys want to know what little girls hide under their skirts. And I am sure all little girls also want to know what is hiding inside little boys’ pants. It’s normal.

  Federman, nothing is normal with you. Maybe your sister didn’t like what you were doing to her. Maybe she felt you were imposing yourself.

  I don’t know what my sister was thinking or feeling, but she was laughing. Perhaps she was feeling what William Butler Yeats expressed so beautifully in his poem “Leda and the Swan,” the shudder in the loins.

  My sisters never knew le frisson au bas du ventre. It was denied to them. Unless they were ... Oh, what a horrible thought.

  You could have told something else. Another story of what you did with your sisters.

  Tell what? The sordid moments we spent together in our crummy little apartment in Montrouge? That would reduce the story of my sisters to pathetic naturalism. My sisters deserve better than that.

  But what I’ll insert here is the poem I wrote for my sister Jacqueline.

  OUR SISTER

  in memory

  Brother, she says,

  from far away in the dark

  write the poem

  I will whisper to you,

  but he is afraid

  that the words

  will not come out right.

  Brother, she says, her voice rising

  from a little pile of ashes,

  when you crossed the ocean

  and felt sick to your stomach,

  did you feel sick for me too?

  Brother, she says, among dead leaves,

  when you fell in love the first time

  and felt the great original frisson

  and everything in you was giddy,

  did you also feel happy for me?

  I wish I could say more about my sisters, but that’s all that’s left of them – that photo, and Maman squeezing us in her arms when war was declared.

  This morning, as I reread what I have already written about my childhood, I realize that the story is finished.

  I had promised to tell the most important moments of my childhood. I don’t think there is much more to tell. What could be told would be what usually happens during any childhood, happy and unhappy moments.

  Besides, just as my childhood was brusquely interrupted the day my mother hid me in the closet, and I heard her last word. The story of my childhood should also stop abruptly.

  But I would still like to tell one happy moment with my mother whi
ch I have never forgotten.

  It was on my birthday. I don’t remember which one. I had gone to the bakery with my mother. When she was ready to pay for the bread she was buying, she said to the boulangère, Donnez-moi aussi un éclair au chocolat. It surprised me that my mother was buying only one éclair.

  In the street my mother gave me the éclair and said, Here, for your birthday, but eat it now, and don’t tell your sisters.

  My poor mother that day could not afford to buy three chocolate eclairs for her children.

  This book is for my mother.

  Federman ...

  Yes? What?

  Nothing ...

  Shhh.............................................................................................Chut

  Afterword

  As Federman Used to Say

  by Ted Pelton

  As Federman used to say when I was his student in the mid-80s that each of his books began with a sentence he heard in his head, here is a sentence for Federman, who recently, as he would also say, changed tense—a death sentence if you will, for Raymond, who was himself both fact and fiction, so that it was difficult to tell which was which, as he was French, but also American, had been a US citizen from before I was born, had fought in the Korean War and jumped out of airplanes in an American army uniform, and yet whose accent sounded so f.o.b. that you didn’t at first take note of the dissonance it created with his superb facility with the English language, and who would himself downplay that facility because, as he once also told me, he was not interested in belles lettres but instead, Pelton, he would say, I want to write lettres de merde, adding the translation immediately afterward, I want to write shit letters, Pelton, and now I cannot even think of him speaking to me in those days without hearing in my head him calling me not Ted but then always Pelton, thickly French-accented, so that it rhymes with Bell-tone, and which I’m not sure he even did all that often, it was a long time ago, and this was always one of the points of Raymond’s writing, that there is no getting back to what actually happened because we confuse it with our stories and our stories become layers of sediment over the originary moment which, when we look for it, isn’t there, or is underneath, or of changed contour, or is not really of interest anyway because what has come later, what has replaced it, what has become the memory stand-in, the usurper, the that-which-if-you-didn’t-know-better-you-would-swear-was-the-memory, a process I was already aware of in Ray’s work, but which was revealed to me just this past year as even more radically at issue than I had supposed when I was speaking to his daughter Simone and I recalled in passing the “closet episode,” the originary moment of the creation of the Federman we all know, when he was cut off from all that he was theretofore and entrapped like a bug in amber in history and accident when the French police in league with the Gestapo came up the stairs to his family’s apartment and his mother said Shhh and pushed him in the closet and the rest of the family was deported to Auschwitz, and Simone said, Yeah, if that’s really what happened, because with Federman one finally can never be completely sure, everything is up for grabs, even as his work grounded itself in that which was so horribly, unspeakably factual, six million times factual, nine million times factual, so factual that to deny its facticity is a criminal offense in many parts of the world, but that even so, finally, like all else, becomes words, became words, changed tense, as Raymond himself now has, kept from doing so for sixty-seven years by the actions of his mother in his story, the mother to whom he dedicates the final words of his final book in English, that the press I direct, Starcherone Books, has now published—“This book is for my mother / Federman? / Yes? What? / Nothing....”—so that, of course, it is unsatisfying to call this just a story, of course, that which relates to life and death, or to the saving of a life, or to a new birth, or to a first birth, of course, this is not merely story, or rather, mere and story should not be linked together, and, of course, accidents happen, because mere in French is mother, mère, of course we should not make light, we should not pun and, of course, this is what The Voice in the Closet is also all about, the travesty of taking experience and making it into story, and I quote, no I cannot resign myself to being the inventory of his miscalculations I am not ready for his summation nor do I wish to participate any longer willy nilly in the fiasco of his fabrication failed account of my survival abandoned in the dark with nothing but my own excrement to play with now neatly packaged on the roof to become the symbol of my origin in the wordshit of his fabulation, unquote, of course, there is a real, and of course the story cheats it of its power, falsifies it in representing it, misrepresents it, of course, but you can still tell this story Raymond, they would tell him, it’s a great story, of war and its aftermath, of loss and individual courage and carrying on, of coming to the land of opportunity, why do you insist on messing it up with all that trivia, of course it’s interesting theoretically, they would tell him, but what our readers really want is the story, so why don’t you just get rid of all that stuff about the noodles and the apartment and the trivia and the toothpaste and your car and masturbation, and of course it can’t really be told, they would tell him, but that’s the business of writing, it’s entertainment, we all know that, of course what happened to your family is terrible, awful beyond words—people want to hear that story, and they want to hear about the young man who came to America and became a success, that’s the best kind of story, tell that, they would tell him, you will make a lot of money... and Federman said, and those of us who love him love him for this, You know, Ted, for he was calling me Ted by this time, we had become friends, it was many years later, You know, Ted, I went home and I locked myself in a room and I spent two years demolishing that novel, I wrecked it, I took their notion of coherence and dismantled it, I threw words and letters all over the page, I dismembered that novel, I destroyed it, I massacred it, I decapitated it, and it became words, and fragments of words, and pictures and designs made out of letters on the page, and I never made a penny, because it became words and letters and incoherence and I would not tell their story, because I told the only stories I could tell, and there is no distinction between memory and imagination, I would not falsify, because I would not lie, because when I walk down the street, my sisters might turn the corner ahead of me and meet me there, and I have to believe that, and how could I tell them when I saw them that I had lied, that I had taken the money, that I had sold them for coin, that I had pissed on their memory, that I had not insisted on the truth in my fictions?

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Excerpts from this book were previously published in American Book Review and Vice. Starcherone Books thanks the editors of these publications, as well as Joshua Cohen for his editorial assistance, and Steve Ansell for technical assistance.

  “As Federman Used to Say” by Ted Pelton previously appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and was excerpted in American Book Review.

  This publication is made possible with help from taxpayers of the state of New York, through the New York State Council for the Arts.

  Copyright © 2010 by Raymond Federman

  Cover design by Rebecca Maslen

  Cover photo of Raymond Federman, circa 1932-33. In photo on page 249 of members of Federman family, Raymond’s mother Marguerite is standing on right. Both courtesy of the author’s family.

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