Revolution Baby

by Joanna Gruda

  The Jansons, our neighbors, also had two daughters. A grown-up one who was friends with the Brisson girls, and another one, Suzanne, who was my age . . . and who seemed delighted by my arrival. Every time I ran into her, she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. Initially she didn’t talk to me. But very soon she began to ask me about myself, and then started talking about her own life. She introduced me to other young people, took me on a tour of the village and the surroundings. I thought that for a girl she was actually rather nice, and she even knew almost as much as I did about plants and animals. One day she came and knocked on the door.

  “Hello, Roger! How are you? Say, my sister and her friend are going to the movies, and my parents are forcing me to go with them. I don’t really feel like acting the chaperone all evening, so I thought that, since you told me once that you really liked the movies, so I thought that, even though I have to leave in a few minutes, maybe you—”

  “I’m coming.”

  Suzanne hadn’t been talking for more than five seconds, and when I agreed, the little pink circles on her cheeks spread to her entire face.

  On the way there, I didn’t know where to look. Suzanne’s sister and her “friend” didn’t stop cuddling, and kissing on the mouth, and putting their hands all over each other. I was fascinated, I really would have liked to watch them, and I also wanted to learn something about what you are supposed to do with girls, but I felt horribly embarrassed, and I was afraid I might have a physiological reaction and Suzanne would notice. And she kept talking and talking and talking and looking everywhere except at her sister.

  Once we were at the cinema, Marguerite, the older sister, made it clear to us that we had to sit as far away as possible from her and her boyfriend. Which was a relief to me, that way I could concentrate on the film.

  How wrong I was. As soon as the film began, Suzanne moved closer to me, just a bit, and then a bit more . . . I tried to act naturally, but I wondered whether I should just let her do what she was doing or take an active part. No sooner had I started deliberating than her face was up against mine and a hot tongue was making its way between my lips. I couldn’t decide whether I liked it, but I tried to respond as best I could with my own tongue to the movements of this moist muscle of Suzanne’s. I concentrated very hard to stay calm. And to think quickly. I came to the conclusion that maybe it would be all right to put my hand on her thigh. I started just above the knee then gradually moved up . . . Darn, my mistake, she pushed my hand away. I was ill at ease, so I withdrew a bit . . . but then Suzanne grabbed my hand and shoved it under her skirt! Now I was in foreign territory. I touched the skin on her thigh a little bit, but I could tell from the way she was moving her hips that Suzanne would like for me to explore further. I was worried about what I might find there. But, oh well, all’s fair in love and war! I shoved my hand up further. She moaned, but she didn’t push me away. I went on, trying to gauge her reaction so I could analyze the relevance of my gestures. I touched the edge of her underpants. She went on making little moaning sounds and squeezing closer and closer to me.

  I didn’t get to see any of the film . . . and it took me a few minutes before I dared stand up when it was time to leave the cinema. Once we were outdoors, Suzanne looked at me with big languorous eyes that filled me with immense pride. I felt like I’d come off not too badly, and I had every intention of finding another opportunity, as soon as possible, to perfect my new talent.

  Two days later I was on my way home with two bottles of milk I’d been sent to fetch at the Maugout farm when I ran into Suzanne. She looked at me, then averted her eyes and walked on without saying a thing. I stood still, not knowing what to do, and suddenly I remembered Rolande, how upon my arrival at the holiday camp she had treated me with indifference, and how I had later regretted my failure to insist. So I went after Suzanne.

  “Hey! Suzanne, are you busy? I only have two or three things left to do, and after that I’m free. We could go to the beach. Would you like that?”

  “Well, uh, I don’t know. Well, all right, yes, why not.”

  I would have preferred a more enthusiastic reaction, but never mind, I’d have to make do with a lukewarm “yes.”

  At the beach, on the riverbank, I suddenly felt ill at ease. I realized we would not be able to reproduce the events from the dark cinema here, but I tried to sit near her, so that our thighs touched. But every time, she moved away. I had to change my strategy. I tried to find a topic of conversation that would interest her, thinking that this might make it easier for me to inch my way closer to her, subtly.

  “Have I ever told you that I know how to talk to animals?”

  She gave me a funny look, as if she had just found out that I was a complete idiot.

  “Well, after a fashion . . . in fact, when I was little . . . ”

  I stopped short. I couldn’t go telling her about how I had just arrived in a French orphanage and only spoke Polish! This was the first time I had ever ventured onto such thin ice.

  “Well, uh, it was just that animals always came up to me, I even looked after an owl, I had this sort of gift, and the kids in my neighborhood said that I knew how to speak animal language.”

  “That’s nice.”

  Phew, that was a close call. I would have to learn not to let girls make me lose my concentration. But she didn’t seem impressed. While I was hunting for something else to talk about, a detachment of German soldiers showed up, all carrying bath towels. It wasn’t unusual for German soldiers to come and cool off in the river, and nobody paid any attention to their presence. Suzanne stood up.

  “Well, since we’re not swimming, I’m going home.”

  Was that what she wanted, to go swimming? Why didn’t I think of it? Both of us in the water, in our bathing suits, side by side. But why hadn’t she said anything? I was disheartened by my lack of know-how with girls. Suzanne had already left, and I couldn’t decide whether to follow her or not. Finally, I stood up and got ready to go back to the village. That was when I noticed that the sound of airplanes I had heard in the distance earlier was getting louder and louder. I could make out a squadron of English planes, those famous Black Widows with two fuselages. Someone shouted, “Take cover, quickly, they’re going to shoot the Germans!”

  I rushed over to a ditch, where I curled up in as small a ball as possible. The crackling began. It was raining all around me. After a while, I realized it was the sound of cartridges falling. I had enough experience of the war to know that if the cartridges were falling here, it meant they were shooting at something farther on. So I stood up to see what was going on. And then, suddenly, it was horrible, terrible. I was stinging, burning all over my body! I looked around and saw that in my panic I hadn’t noticed that I’d found refuge in a field of nettles . . . in my bathing suit!

  I hurled myself into the river to cool off my body, then quickly forgot my physical discomfort because I saw the most amazing spectacle, courtesy of the Royal Air Force: they were bombarding a train going by just on the other side of the Marne.

  Toward the end of the summer Albert requisitioned me, along with the entire family and several neighbors whose pigs he had slaughtered during the year, to harvest the fields at the bottom of the hill by the river. No more holiday resort! The first days, we had to make sheaves with the wheat Albert had reaped and place them in the haystacks to keep them from rotting in case it rained. Then we had to gather the sheaves: you stabbed one with a pitchfork, got up your momentum, thrust it into the cart, and again, stab, momentum, thrust, and so on. By the end of the day, I was exhausted.

  Once the harvest was over it was time to say goodbye—I had to go back to my lycée. I was sad to leave Mont-Saint-Père and the Brisson family, and disappointed not to have renewed my experience at the movies with Suzanne, but I was eager to get back to Paris, where I had every intention of finding an opportunity to put what I had learned about girls into practice.


  CHAPTER 32

  At the Lycée

  I picked up my life exactly where I had left it. I was in the fifth class, at the Collège Jean-Baptiste-Say, and I was reunited with all my friends from the previous year. I also settled back into my usual habits at Francine and Michel’s. So much stability was almost destabilizing. But you get used to everything at that age, even routine.

  I had a new friend, Maciek. He took the same route as me, morning and evening. One day I suggested we go to the movies. He had never been before and he came out of this first session with the shining eyes of a child who’s just had a trip in a hot air balloon. I became his official companion for outings to the movies and whenever he had a bit of pocket money he would grab me by the sleeve and beg me to go with him.

  Maciek was the son of Polish peasants who had come to settle in France shortly before the war. Sometimes he would talk to me, rolling his r’s, about his life in the Polish countryside, about the horses he used to look after when he was little, and the mountains with their snowy peaks, and cold beet soup and kielbasa. And there was I, Roger Binet, having to pretend I had never heard of any of that, and didn’t know a thing about Slavic customs. It wasn’t a very big lie, because other than the few words I still knew of the animal language (tak, nie, gówno and królik) and two or three very vague but pleasant memories of Hugo and Fruzia, I didn’t remember much about the country of my early childhood. Since leaving Poland with Lena, I had been to so many different places, lived so many different lives, that my Polish period seemed almost unreal to me. But I liked to listen to Maciek talking about his past in Poland, and he was really happy to tell me about it, because I was the only one of his friends who was interested.

  That year, the favorite teacher of almost all the children in the fifth class was the Spanish teacher. He was a very tall man with incredibly long arms, and he often came in late. To start the class, he always got our attention by teaching us a new “bad word” in Spanish, something he took very seriously. Therefore, joder, puta, hostia, cojones, cabrón and puñetas were the first words I learned in that language, and years later they were more or less all that remained. Without having to be told, all the children understood the importance of discretion with regard to this very unorthodox introduction to the language.

  Otherwise, as far as teachers went, the school had not been kind to us. Everyone hated the chemistry teacher, Monsieur Masson, because he was strict beyond belief and horribly cold. While his attitude meant that his classes were pretty dull affairs, from time to time he had to pay the price for being so despicable: he was the butt of practical jokes.

  One day, when Monsieur Masson was walking up and down the stairs in his white coat in the amphitheater explaining some concept to do with the periodic table, little Alfred, who didn’t know what more he could do to stay awake, splashed some purple ink at him with his pen. Silence. The teacher turned around abruptly. He stood there, unmoving, for a few seconds that seemed to drag on forever. He stared at Alfred, then walked over to him—probably very quickly, but the images I have retained of this event unfold in slow motion. Not saying a thing, he grabbed him by the shirt and forced him to stand up. Then he motioned to him to descend a few steps . . . and thump! kicked him soundly in the back. Alfred fell to the ground, rolled down the steps . . . and didn’t get up. We all looked at one another, not knowing whether we should rush over to him or stay where we were in our seats. Finally, Monsieur Masson went up to Alfred and turned him over. He was all floppy. The professor went red in the face and shouted that we had to help him carry the kid to the infirmary.

  Alfred recovered all right, but this incident was fatal to the chemistry teacher’s reputation. A wind of rebellion blew through the classroom. After Alfred’s fainting spell, Monsieur Masson found it harder and harder to maintain discipline in his classes. As for me, I wrote short stories during the chemistry classes, pretending to be taking notes with the utmost diligence. As I knew that chemistry would never be of any use in my life, I preferred to spend the time perfecting my literary talent. From the time I had started at the lycée, my decision had been made: I would become a journalist or a novelist. Or a bit of both. So science would not be much use to me.

  While nobody liked Monsieur Masson, where Monsieur Vidal the drawing teacher was concerned, it was more of a personal matter between the two of us. A personal matter that would also lead to a loss of consciousness. And this time, the fault would be mine alone.

  I was not good at drawing or art in general. I don’t know why, but between what I imagined in my head and what appeared on the paper there was always an insurmountable gap. And yet I really made an effort. But I think it just wasn’t in the genes. And as for Monsieur Vidal . . . well, my handicap just made him laugh. He loved showing my drawings to the entire class, and thought it was great fun to have them guess what I was trying to depict. It was painful. And humiliating. My drawings got more and more slapdash as the year progressed. And Monsieur Vidal derived more and more pleasure from them.

  His cruelty toward me was not the only reason for my hatred. It’s true, I swear! There were political reasons, too, for we were poles apart. Can you imagine, my tormentor thought that throughout the entire history of France there were only two heroes worthy of admiration: Joan of Arc and Marshal Philippe Pétain. Joan of Arc, the maid of Orléans, I don’t mind. She kicked the English out of Orléans, that’s not bad. But in my humble opinion, she was still no more than an enlightened crank. And as for Marshal Pétain, he was at best an opportunistic collaborationist and at worst, a fascist, anti-Semitic old man who brought about France’s downfall so that he could seize power.

  If I’ve devoted this long preamble to my relations with Monsieur Vidal, to describe the hatred he aroused in me, it’s not solely my self-esteem at work. All alone in my corner, I was quietly plotting my revenge. Fairly recently I had started spending a lot of time in joke and novelty shops. And I needed some new victims on whom to test my purchases. Monsieur Vidal seemed the perfect candidate. I hesitated between a stink bomb and a whoopee cushion, placed discreetly on his chair just before class. It would be funny, but I wasn’t sure . . . Both were fairly common, and not nearly nasty enough.

  One morning I had a sudden burst of inspiration. When he had his back turned I blew a strong dose of sneezing powder at his head. Let’s just say I might have overdone it. Monsieur Vidal didn’t even have time to realize what had happened before he started choking . . . His lips went blue and he collapsed on the floor in a faint. Silence in the classroom. Followed by intense commotion. And silence again when Monsieur Vidal got back to his feet, stood there for a few moments holding onto a chair, then left the room. We sat stock still, not daring to imagine what would happen next. Personally, I felt sad. My revenge had been more spectacular than planned, but for some unknown reason it didn’t satisfy me. And I was worried about what was to come.

  For a very long while, nothing happened. All you could hear in the classroom was some whispering and the rustling of paper. Then the door opened. It was the headmaster.

  “Monsieur Vidal has just been to my office. I suppose that what happened to him is the result of a particularly stupid prank. I will not leave this room until I have the name of the perpetrator of these vile shenanigans. Would anyone care to come forward?”

  Silence.

  “So be it. Well, would anyone care to denounce the culprit?”

  Long silence.

  “Given the gravity of the incident, I will allow myself to resort to a method that I don’t often use. I will give the culprit, or anyone who knows his identity, two more minutes to come forward. After that, the entire class will be punished, very severely.”

  Heavy silence.

  Which I eventually broke, after ten seconds or so had gone by.

  “It was me . . . ”

  “Excuse me. Could you speak up, Master Binet?”

  “It was me.”

 
“You are guilty, is that what you are saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, good. Then come with me. The rest of you, take out a book, a notebook, anything, find something to do until the end of class. Quietly.”

  My tête-à-tête with the headmaster was not exactly pleasant. He asked me where I had bought my sneezing powder. I tried as best I could to protect my sources. My punishment consisted of three days’ suspension from school and a zero for conduct. As was to be expected, this misadventure did not improve my relations with the drawing teacher. But he no longer dared make fun of me. He merely acted as if I did not exist, which, in the end, was better.

  All of this was nothing compared to the scolding I got from Francine when I came home and informed her that I had three days off ahead of me. She was furious! No matter how often I explained that Monsieur Vidal deserved his punishment, and that it had not gone the way I expected, she would not calm down. She thought that for someone who was living under an assumed name with false papers, I had acted extremely carelessly. She wasn’t wrong. I hadn’t seen things from that angle.

  “I hope you didn’t say that it was your teacher’s political opinions that you gave you such pleasure in causing him to faint.”

  “Well, no, I’m not that stupid.”