In the Moon

by Alan Holmes

  A week or so later, Mother announced that Miss Miller had asked her to come in for a parent-teacher conference (another American novelty). This piece of news made me extremely nervous. Had Miss Miller discovered my untruths? Would she punish me for telling a huge lie to the whole class? Would Mr. Derosier expel me from a school I liked so much? Had I exceeded the limits of reason? How could that be? I was eight years old and well into the age of reason. Wasn’t I immune to being unreasonable?

  When Mother returned from the conference, I heard her call me in a cold, severe tone from downstairs. “Alain, please come to the drawing room. I need to talk to you.” My heart sank. Those words and that tone of voice usually implied trouble.

  When I entered the drawing room, Mother was sitting at her desk. “Miss Miller wanted to know more about our life in India,” she said. I stood silent, not knowing what to say. Then she added, with a deadpan expression, “And she showed me your turning classroom. It’s every bit as wonderful as you said it was!”

  “You saw it?” I replied incredulously, not knowing whether the game was over or whether Mother expected me to keep up the pretense.

  “No, Alain, unfortunately I didn’t see it. And I’m not sure which is the biggest fib—Bajawanda or the turning classroom. They’re both marvelous little tales, but I hope you didn’t think anyone would believe you!”

  “Then why did everyone act as though they believed me? They tricked me—that’s not fair!”

  “It seems to me you were trying to trick them. All of us let you go on with your stories, waiting to see when you would trip yourself up. Those who tell fibs usually trip up because they have to keep telling new fibs to make the first one hold up. When a fibber trips up, we all think it’s funny, and we have a good laugh at his expense. But if the fibs are such that they hurt someone, we punish the fibber.”

  As a result of this little homily, I decided there were dangers in being taken too seriously when I was just having fun. After that, if someone smiled knowingly when he inquired about my elephant, I would happily spin a new tale about Bajawanda. But if anyone sounded serious when asking about Baji, I would admit that Bajawanda was just a story I had made up for the sole purpose of outdoing Youssef.

  The questions about Bajawanda did not continue for long. The real reason for the parent-teacher conference had been that the teacher felt I wasn’t doing my class work properly; I was not keeping up with the other students. That may have been because I had spent so much of my class time drawing up the details of the turning classroom. However, since I was only eight years old and most of the students in fourth grade were about ten, Mother and Miss Miller decided to bump me down to the third grade, which was in the Junior School and across the street from the building where my enchanted classroom was on the top floor.

  The students in the third grade were friendly and welcoming, as was the teacher, Miss Cabinalice (her name rhymed with Alice). However, the change was as severe a blow to my morale as it was to my pride. I no longer spent luminous mornings in the penthouse classroom doing some much needed growing in the warm sunlight and admiring the distant Eiffel Tower. My new classroom was nice enough, but it received only a few meager beams of sunlight in the late afternoon. These filtered through autumn-yellow chestnut leaves and the mottled light patterns were too scant to create luminance or induce much growth. I wondered whether I was doomed to spend another year without growing.

  My new classroom looked out onto a forlorn, scruffy city garden where we played during recess. I carefully chose my seat in the rear of the room so I could look out through the window at the garden or, more precisely, past the garden at the occasional bus that passed on the street beyond. I replaced my wistful gazing at the Eiffel Tower by a careful study of Parisian buses.

  I was especially fascinated by their little rear balconies and much intrigued by the “lavatory chain” that dangled back there, so passengers could pull it to let the driver know they wanted to get off. It struck me that bus riders literally “flushed” themselves out of the back of the bus.

  The third grade classroom was cheerfully decorated, a first for me. The walls were covered with the artwork of previous students and, as the year wore on, with our own pictures. That too, was a novelty, in sharp contrast to the French classrooms I had known, where the bare walls had usually been a dull gray and looked as though they had not known fresh paint in a hundred years. My new classroom had freshly painted cream-colored walls and was decorated with travel posters, maps, and student’s artwork.

  The daily performance of each pupil was noted on a large wall chart on which were pasted-on stars of different colors. Each of us had a row on this chart, and at the end of each day, Miss Cabinalice added one star to each student’s row. She awarded a silver star for “above average,” and a gold star denoted “absolutely the best,” as she put it. Each day, she awarded only one silver and one gold star. A black star was used to denote poor performance or bad behavior requiring disciplinary action.

  The rest of us had to settle for a category she called “satisfactory” and, from a bowl containing stars of about twenty different colors, we could choose the color we liked best. Each student soon established a solid row of his favorite color or, sometimes, a pattern of repeating colors.

  I found no incentive for earning honor stars. I felt they were a lifeless, muddy imitation of true gold and silver—insipid and fake looking. The gold stars were actually a brownish yellow with a little metallic sparkle thrown in to redeem their basic drabness. Likewise, silver was just plain old gray if I blurred my vision by squinting. I much preferred the bright tones of the “satisfactory” stars and studiously avoided any scholastic effort that might earn me a gold or silver one.

  Once, I earned a silver star and I remember exclaiming aloud, “Zut alors! How did that happen?” Miss Cabinalice looked puzzled by my reaction, but didn’t ask me about it. Nor did I volunteer any explanation. Grown-ups—Raimond excepted—never seemed to understand the way I thought. It was just too much trouble trying to get through to them and so often fruitless.

  Actually, we received two identical stars every day. Miss Cabinalice pasted a second matching star on our forehead so that our parents could see how we were doing on a daily basis. The stars on my forehead created a minor problem for me. When I reached home in the late afternoon, it was time for my bath, and the star was invariably washed off before Mother and Father ever saw it. Raimond, who always knew what really mattered, stuck the star back on my forehead after my bath, using a paste made of flour and water, to the despair of Mother. At bedtime, Mother insisted on soaking off the star with a damp washcloth, maintaining that it wasn’t healthy for me to sleep with a star pasted on my forehead. I suspect she didn’t approve of my eating supper with a star on my forehead either, but she knew she couldn’t push me that far.

  One of the highlights of the day was when a teacher from the Senior School, Mr. Spafford, drove us home at five o’clock. About eight students lived in the same general area as Mr. Spafford, and we all squeezed quite comfortably into his spacious V-8 Ford sedan, an exotic car in France at the time. I remember how much I enjoyed the unusual sound and power of its engine. The car literally bounded up the hills of Ville-d’Avray in high gear, whereas Mother’s little Simca ground slowly up these hills in first.

  The Ford had another extravagant feature, a radio, but all we could receive on it was classical music. This exasperated Mr. Spafford who complained that he wanted to listen to “jazz.” I asked him what jazz was, and he answered that he was hard put to describe it.

  When we didn’t listen to the radio, Mr.Spafford led us in an assortment of songs. Among the many titles from various nations were “Au Clair de la Lune,” “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary,” or our favorite, an American song, which I have never heard since. The refrain went like this:

  I went to the animal’s fair,

  The birds and t
he beasts were there. The old raccoon

  By the light of the moon

  Was combing his golden hair.

  The monkey he got drunk

  And climbed up the elephant’s trunk.

  The elephant sneezed

  And fell on his knees,

  And that was the end of the monk, the monk,

  And that was the end of the monk.

  During recess at school, I reclaimed my role as an organizer of games. I still remember the names of some of my faithful lieutenants and colleagues. Jean-Louis was a slightly chubby and jovial French boy who could be depended on through thick and thin. Boris was skinny and furtive looking, the son of White Russian refugees. He was clever at coming up with devious and sinister plans once the games were in motion but had to be watched for overdoing it. Jimmy Retter was an American boy who refused to obey the rules I established and who frequently disrupted the games with his unruliness. Retter’s tendency to create mayhem extended to his classroom conduct. On the classroom chart where performance stars were posted, nearly all of the ones beside his name were black. Worse yet, he boasted about it!

  Though I alone undertook the organizing of the games, I was not necessarily the captain of one of the two “camps.” Organizing meant deciding on rules and modifying these rules if flaws emerged in the game plan. As official game organizer, I also decided who did what and where, defined boundaries between camps, and settled disputes. I loved to experiment with rule changes to see if I could make the games more exciting. I sometimes urged the stopping and restarting of games if rules or boundaries turned out to be impractical or unfair. By and large, my peers tolerated this, and no one ever protested my assuming this role.

  At the start of recess, all the boys gathered around me to see what game we would play and what new rules applied, if any. Prolonged debates about rules occasionally took place. The debates were surprisingly orderly and sometimes lasted through the whole recess period. In fact, the activity should rightly have been called “the game of debating about game rules.”

  Our games were more sophisticated versions of those I had organized two years earlier at l’École Sugerre. The usual scenario involved two warring camps, taking prisoners by tagging them in certain specified zones of the playground, and rescuing them by “untagging” in other designated zones. The games involved a lot of running and chasing, or being chased, but no rough stuff—indeed, no physical contact except for the tagging. I usually added a theme to the game by having the camps pretend to be Robin Hood’s Band of Merry Men versus the Sheriffs of Nottingham, or the American Escadrille Lafayette versus the Red Baron’s Squadron, or just Pioneers and Indians. It amused me that the themes seemed to be what my peers especially enjoyed and for which I was most appreciated. My own view of the themes was that they were icing on the cake and of no great consequence to the game. What mattered to me were judiciously chosen boundaries between camps, how well the rules worked, and whether they were fair and the game fun.

  Among the students who occasionally participated in our games was Olinka, another White Russian, who became a tomboy after I convinced her that the boy’s games were more fun than no games at all, which is what the rest of the girls seemed to prefer. All the other girls steadfastly refused to play the boys’ games despite my numerous entreaties. It wasn’t just the power I was after—that too, of course. I honestly believed that the more players there were, the merrier the game would be. Besides, why wouldn’t girls enjoy running, chasing or being chased, and triumphing in battle as much as the boys did?

  Olinka’s conversion to my cause was the result of an amusing incident. An iron grill fence separated the playground from the street, and its gate was usually locked. One day, the gate was left open, and a large German shepherd came into the school playground. This breed was widely used in France as guard dogs, and they had a reputation for being fierce and nasty. When Olinka saw the dog, she became terrified and started screaming for help as she ran towards a woodpile in a corner of the playground. Out of forty children present, the dog singled her out and ended his chase barking at her heels as she scrambled up the woodpile. Olinka climbed high enough to be just out of his reach and pleaded to be rescued as the dog growled and snapped at her heels.

  I remembered that Raimond had once told me that if you talk forcefully and in a tone of authority to a fierce dog it wouldn’t attack you. I placed great trust in what Raimond said and immediately decided to put his dictum to the test. With apprehension, I marched up to the dog and, in as gruff a voice as I could muster, I snapped at it, “Ça suffit!” (“That’s enough!”) To my amazement, the dog stopped barking. I followed up with, “Go on—go away!” in French, of course, for that’s all a French dog can understand. Appropriate shooing motions accompanied all this. Raimond was right, at least as far as this dog was concerned.

  By now, Miss Cabinalice was on the scene and joined me in coaxing the dog across the playground and out through the gate. Then I returned to the woodpile where the frightened Olinka was still calling for help, protesting that she couldn’t get down. I helped her down by holding onto each of her shoes in succession, guiding each one to a place in the pile where she would find a safe foothold. Upon reaching terra firma, Olinka exclaimed, “Alain, you are so sweet!” and promptly put her arms around my neck and kissed me affectionately.

  Among the boys who had gathered to watch the proceedings was the infamous Jimmy Retter, and he began taunting me with, “Alain likes girls—Alain prefers girls!”

  Grasping at anything to save face, I boldly declared that Olinka was really a spy and working for our side and that although I had found the kiss somewhat distasteful, it was in reality an important secret signal. At the time the dog had entered the playground, I happened to be the commander of a squadron of World War fighter pilots, so my story wasn’t all that far-fetched.

  “Isn’t that right, Olinka?” I said, nodding my head up and down discreetly as I put the question to her, hoping she would notice my gesture and play along. “Now you must join our squadron and fly away with us,” I continued with a tone of urgency and authority.

  She apparently realized my predicament and replied, “Yes, I am your spy. But Alain, you must tell me exactly what a spy does, because I have no idea.”

  I heaved a sigh of relief when I saw that Retter failed to notice the implications of her remark. The others had missed it as well, or were just too impressed by my improvisation, and went along with it, curious to see how a girl would work out. Olinka did just fine; she could run as well as the rest of my squadron, just as I had thought she could. She had long, slender, muscular legs which I had noticed and admired as she descended from the woodpile.

  Raimond had saved the day on two counts—not only in the matter of staring down dogs but also by telling me about spies and the secret signals they use. He had recently described to me at some length the exploits of Mata Hari and other spies.

  Thereafter, Olinka frequently took part in our games. In truth, I had greatly enjoyed her kiss and was disappointed to receive no others, despite my efforts to find another plausible basis for this honor. As is usual in such situations, my sustained and thwarted longing soon caused me to develop a secret crush on Olinka.

  One Saturday, when Father had taken Mother to London for a weekend vacation, I told Raimond—the only person I really trusted in such matters—of my secret liking for Olinka and asked him to take me to her house for a visit so she and I could play together. He couldn’t have been more sympathetic to my cause and immediately agreed to my request. My guess is that he welcomed a rare pretext to be out of the house and away from Françoise for a few hours. He might also be able to spend an hour or two in a café while I was visiting my paramour.

  I knew Olinka’s last name and, luckily, Raimond found that there was only one Valnikov in the Paris directory. I also knew the district where she lived and, fortunately, the Valnikov fa
mily was listed in the arrondissement that included this district. Without further delay, Raimond and I set off on a circuitous trip requiring that we take a train and two bus rides.

  When we reached Olinka’s house, unannounced, Olinka’s mother was more alarmed than pleased by our arrival at her door. This may have been because Raimond was still wearing his yellow- and black-striped butler’s waistcoat, a bright red wool scarf around his neck, and no coat. (When we set out on the trip, even I had thought his attire a little outré, but never thought it might cause a problem.)

  “What is the purpose of your visit?” Madame Valnikov asked bluntly.

  “Olinka and I are very good friends at school, Madame, and I thought we could play together,” I replied earnestly. She eyed me suspiciously and turned to Olinka who had arrived at the door while we were talking.

  Olinka seemed dumbfounded by my arrival. After a pause, she said in a pathetic tone, “Alain, all I have to play with are my dolls, and this house has no garden, so we can’t go outside and play hide-and-seek or anything like that.”

  “C’est rudement dommage,” (“It’s a great pity”) I replied, caught off balance and unable to think of anything that might save the day. Then I added tersely, “I’ll see you back in school on Monday. Au revoir.” It was all over in a flash. Raimond murmured some apologies to Olinka’s mother for having burst in on her the way we did, and we left with our tails between our legs.

  On the way to the bus stop, Raimond (whose own plans may also have been thwarted) volunteered that both of us were “guilty of not making sound plans,” and he proposed that we not mention this incident to Mother. I readily concurred.