I half turned to walk away, but the driver, who had caught sight of me standing on the roadside, would have none of it. He bent low over the wheel—the better to pull on the emergency brake, I presumed, which, if logic prevailed, led me to deduce that the foot brake was inoperative—and the bus ground to a halt barely a foot in front of me. The door creaked open, and the driver motioned me aboard. I shook my head. “Merci! Marcher. Préfère marcher!” Thanks, but I think I’ll walk.
“Ah,” the driver turned back to his packed house and roared: “Un Américain! Nous avons un Américain!” We have an American! How could he tell? At worst, I’d been told, I might be taken for a Burgundian. Standing there hopelessly, I felt like a fish that had just been hooked, with the driver irresistibly reeling me in. “Reeling” was doubtless the operative word, given the previous night’s alcoholic intake, and my resistance was low, very low. So in I went, slinging my knapsack off my shoulder. Not only was there no empty seat, but the aisle was filled as well, with men, women, children, and several crates of clucking chickens.
“Pas de place,” I said with a shrug. No room. But the driver only smiled, motioned me toward the rear, slammed the thing in gear, and rocketed away, sending me sprawling into the arms of a well-endowed young lady, who reacted to the incident not with horror or distress—which one might expect back home—but with great good humor. I excused myself and struggled to my feet. She shook her head, as if to say she hadn’t minded a bit, straightened her slightly rumpled blouse, and lowered her eyes. I was upright again but hanging on for dear life as the driver, who seemed to revel in the contest between him and the road, barreled forward into the blinding sun.
Somewhere in the middle of the bus a strapping lad stood up and motioned for me to take his place. I shook my head. He insisted. “Pour l’Américain,” he said. “Pour vous.” Both palms thrust outward, I shrugged and, hopefully, for my Calvados-influenced fluency had suddenly vanished into the far recesses of my brain, reiterated my polite refusal. Suddenly the whole bus chorused, “Pour l’Américain, pour l’Américain!” leaving me little choice but to make my way cautiously down the crowded aisle and take the seat, bowing to the young man as I did. The whole bus applauded. I felt the fish was now in the net. Where next? The frying pan?
They—I refer to the bus collectively, for several took turns asking questions—wanted to know, first, why was I wearing this army uniform, was I a soldier left over from the war? What was I doing on this local bus, on which no American had, to the best of their knowledge, ever set foot? Did I like Normandy? Had I tasted the local Calvados? I nodded vigorously, pointing to my temples and turning both forefingers in quick circles. Good for a collective laugh. They wanted to let me know, again collectively, how much they loved Americans, how grateful they were for the Normandy landing, how sad they were to know how many had died in these fields and marshes (for the Germans, shortly before D-day, had flooded many of the fields so that the parachute troops, primed to land on terra firma, had often landed in treacherous waters, with little chance to escape). I, who had contributed nothing to their salvation, was nonetheless basking in the glow of their praise for what my older compatriots had done.
“Only in the air did we have a problem with the Americans,” growled one grizzled farmer, a crate of chickens athwart his knees. “The British were far braver than the Americans. I speak not of the infantry, for I saw many instances of extreme bravery with your fighting soldiers, but of the air force. The British pilots flew in daytime and always came in low, much more dangerous to them, but they focused on their targets and rarely missed. The Americans came at night, they flew high, well beyond the Germans’ antiaircraft range, and when they dropped their bombs, sometimes they hit their targets and sometimes not. On more than one occasion they hit schools, even hospitals. There was no need for that.”
“You can’t blame them for playing it safe!” another male voice from the rear objected.
“You can when it costs the lives of women and children,” someone else countered.
“That doesn’t mean we’re not grateful,” the chicken-laden farmer added. “We are, and always will be. God knows how long the Germans would have been here if you Americans hadn’t joined the war.”
“Les Allemands sont tous des salauds! Des connards!” an adolescent voice piped up from somewhere up front. All Germans are bastards: that I could get. But connards? “Jerks” was my immediate guess, but later I learned the condemnation was tougher, something like, “Germans are assholes.”
“May they all burn in hell!”
“If I ever see another German, I swear I’ll shoot him on the spot.”
“Well, thank God, Germany’s finished for the next hundred years.”
“That’s what we thought thirty years ago, and look what happened.”
“No, this time they finally got what they deserved.”
Back home, there was certainly a feeling that, thank God, Germany was defeated, now we could get on with our lives, but little of this personal animosity, this deep-rooted, visceral hatred. And suddenly I understood, if I had not before, the difference between a people who had been at war, a distant war, and those who had suffered physical occupation, who had had to deal day in and day out for four endless years with the reality of an enemy who could knock on your door at any hour, order you out of your home, and cart you away, or shoot you on sight, maybe your children too. One hell of a difference!
At the Caen train station, where the bus made a special stop for me before proceeding to its final destination in the center of town, it took me a good five minutes to make my way down the chaotic aisle to the open door, as I was obliged to shake hands with virtually everyone. As the bus pulled out, still wheezing, a dozen undulating hands and arms poked through the open windows, waving goodbye and wishing me a bon séjour in France. I was moved. Before I left America, many people had warned me that the French were a very private people, generally wary of foreigners, and might strike one as cold. Cold? During these first days I had found more immediate warmth than I had ever known. This raucous busload, Jean-Luc and Marie, even the baker and the grocer had gone out of their way to welcome me. Less than a week? I had a feeling I had already been here for months!
* * *
High on the Cévennes plateau sat the Collège Cévenol, a school of three hundred students, many from Protestant families throughout France, but with more than a symbolic number of foreigners of varying religions or none at all. “Ecumenical,” a term with which I was till then only vaguely familiar, applied. In those early postwar days similar work camps abounded in Europe, as low-cost, high-principled means to rebuild the shattered core of that continent. Our main task that summer was to build, from the foundation up, Le Luquet, the future administration building.
My closest female friend that summer at Chambon was the head of the Collège Cévenol, Pastor Theis’s eldest daughter, Jeanne, who did as hard a day’s work as any of the men. Completely bilingual and bicultural, Jeanne was a graduate of Swarthmore and in the fall was heading back to the States to teach French at Bryn Mawr, with the hope of becoming head of the French House there the following year. Her knowledge of contemporary French literature was impressive, and knowing my plans for the Sorbonne, she drew up a personal curriculum of what she thought should be my required reading: some sixty-five works in all—more if you counted Proust as multivolume, which it is. Looking at her list, drawn up in careful columns of blue ink, her handwriting tight and neat like her, I was already tired: Proust (all eighteen Gallimard volumes), Martin du Gard, Camus, Denis de Rougemont, Romain Rolland, Saint-Exupéry, Gide, Giraudoux (all fifteen plays!), Cocteau, Claudel, Valéry Larbaud, Bernanos, Mauriac, Duhamel … I’d read Proust in English, in what struck me then as the elegant Scott-Moncrieff translation (which later I came to distrust, for his liberties are too free and frequent, his self-imposed post-Victorian restrictions unacceptable), but I was not sure my French was up to reading him in the original. Jeanne assured me it was, addin
g that even if I didn’t get it all—and many French didn’t either—it would be well worth the effort. When I chided her for providing a list that would take me years to plow through and urged her to prioritize it for me, she chided me back for sounding like a lazy American. When I retorted that perhaps she would like me to draw up an essential list of English-language writers she should concentrate on in her new American teaching post, she assured me that even without knowing the particulars, she’d bet me a thousand francs she had read most. At which point I threw in the towel.
I kept her list, carefully folded, in my French-English dictionary, and over the following years in Paris I checked off those I had read, grading them from one to ten. As time went on, I marveled at the perspicacity and thoughtfulness of Jeanne’s list, the number of eights and nines it scored, its only deficiency being that in drawing it up, she had doubtless relied too heavily on her Protestant background and failed to include the more radical, more revolutionary writers that, as time went on, I increasingly related to, like Sartre and Jean Genet.
* * *
And so it was, on a brilliantly clear day in late August—the twenty-third to be exact—after one last icy plunge in the rushing, crystal-liquid waters of the Lignon, the campers said goodbye to our hosts, Jean-Pierre and Claire, and all the Theises big and small, and boarded the narrow-gauge railway that was to take them down the mountain to St. Étienne and our connecting train to the City of Light. From Paris, most of the Americans were heading off to Cherbourg to catch the ship home. Apart from my friend George Booth and his fiancée, Joanne, I was the only one staying on, and the other campers’ good-natured banter about our year abroad and the many dangers it entailed, especially in Paris (George and Joanne were headed to Geneva), scarcely concealed the smidgen of jealousy they felt.
So, on that sad day—sad because we had all bonded so deeply—the camp was suddenly empty, shorn of the energy and electricity that had infused it for weeks. Since I wasn’t pressured to be back in Paris until late September, and Jeanne’s ship to the States was more than three weeks away, I had suggested to her, almost offhandedly one day, that after the work camp we take a bike trip together. I fully expected her to decline on whatever pretext or say she’d have to check with her parents (as any proper American girl would have done), but she simply smiled and nodded. “Lovely idea. Where to?” “How about Italy?” I said. “If our legs hold out.” “Mine will,” she assured me, and giving them a fair perusal, I was sure they would. Very feminine but lithe and strong. “Don’t forget,” I countered, “I was a college wrestler. Strong legs an absolute necessity.”
Three days post-camp, off we set, knapsacks and sleeping bags snugly strapped fore and aft. Down the Cévennes was a cinch, the only danger being that if the brakes of our 1930s Citroëns failed to hold up, one or the other (both?) might hurtle into the abyss. But we made it down in record time. In flat country now, we headed south, always opting for the small provincial roads, flanked by fields of wheat and corn, of truck gardens galore, of ripening vines and soaring sunflowers whose already-darkening faces drifted with the changing daylight. In villages we bought bread and cheese and ham and a pâté Jeanne informed me was called rillettes, made of pork and utterly delicious. There were virtually no cars on the road, but I knew this was but a brief respite: within a few short years, if not months, even these narrow, tree-lined bucolic roads would be chock-full of gleaming new Renaults and Citroëns hell-bent on heralding this new era called “postwar.”
Our overly ambitious goal was Rome, but it was already the seventh day when we crossed over into Italy, and I realized we still had a good two-thirds of the trip ahead of us. I decided that I should remind my Protestant companion that even God had rested on this day, but Jeanne had a smile that always started slowly, then opened to full glorious measure. She shook her head. “We must press on. We’re at least a day behind schedule.” It was then I learned we had a schedule. “Sixty kilometers,” she said. “That shouldn’t be too hard.” And onto her bike she leaped, beckoning me to follow.
In Italy, we hugged the western coast, pedaling up mountains that seemed Alpine to me, though Jeanne assured me they were little more than hills. “Steep hills,” I said. “The Cévennes are steep hills,” she said. “These are hills.” At night we camped out on rock-strewn shores, cooking over a makeshift fire, bedding down in our trusty sleeping bags, which had the soothing effect of cushioning us from the stones beneath, but only slightly: throughout the night one had the feeling of a never-ending, not-so-gentle massage.
On day eleven I was ready to give up: at rest, my legs were doing a version of Saint Vitus’s dance, unless it was some lesser saint. Jeanne saw me massaging my calves and could not refrain. “How are those wrestler’s legs?” she asked, strictly deadpan. “Oh, fine,” I lied. “And yours? They must be hurting. I’m sorry I suggested such a long trip.” That gentle smile again. “I’m ready to head for Rome if you are.” She was serious. I politely declined. We settled for Florence and on day fourteen bicycled triumphantly into its outskirts, two exhausted but conquering heroes. For the next two days we touristed from morn till night, taking in the art and beauty of this incomparable city on the Arno, which neither of us had seen before.
Originally, I had thought we should bicycle back, but that was when I had first consulted the map, where distances seemed blessedly small. Mere inches apart. So the train it was, with Jeanne descending at St. Étienne to catch the narrow-gauge up the mountains to Le Chambon, while I continued on to Paris, where I had shipped my gear to Frank’s family, the Manchons, three weeks before.
Looking across the quay, I glimpsed Jeanne’s right hand holding the handlebars of her bike, her left waving gently, with that Mona Lisa smile once again gracing her lips. “That,” I remember thinking, “is one hell of a young lady!” And then, from deep within my subconscious, I assume, came this afterthought: If ever I marry, I know it will be to a girl like her. A French girl. They have some extra dimension, a worldview, an attitude I’ve never seen before. And they’re also damn cute.
11
A Room with a View
IN PARIS my first task was to find a place to live. Anything but student quarters. I had come to Paris far more for the city than the university. Sure, I would check out the courses, but I had no intention of spending my days in the gloomy classrooms and auditoriums of that storied institution. Despite the fellowship, my budget was tight, because I was already entertaining the thought that I would stretch my stay to two years if, as I suspected, I loved it here. Frank, my closest friend in Paris, and later the best man at our wedding, was a member of the Collège Cévenol family and was in charge of welcoming and guiding the new students. From Frank, I had the addresses of three or four people who rented rooms in their apartments to students, but having visited two, I made up my mind for privacy. So I began to make the rounds of the Latin Quarter hotels, only to hear invariably, “Sorry, monsieur, we are fully booked.” I had almost given up hope when I trudged up the dimly lit steps of the Hôtel de l’Ancienne Comédie, on the street of the same name hard behind the bustling carrefour de Buci, to be told, yes, we have a room available, but we rent it only for a minimum of six months. Could I see it? Of course, monsieur. The patron, tall and stern but impeccably polite, unfastened from a display case behind his desk a formidable-looking key, to which was attached a wooden triangle bearing the number 16. Room 16, it turned out, was a converted bathroom: in place of the tub was a narrow bed, with room for a table and chair and a battered small armoire, nothing more. Its major virtue was a broad, sunny window that looked out onto the neighboring roofs. René Clair, he who loved Paris’s chimneys and rooftops, would have snapped it up. Its inconvenience, I pointed out to the patron, was that to get to number 16, you had to pass through number 15. My visions of privacy flew out the sun-filled window. “I’m afraid,” I said, “this will not do.” He looked pained. “How,” I managed, trembling for lack of proper French with which to vent my outrage, “how can you co
nceive of offering a room attainable only by passing through that of another tenant?” The thought seemed not to have occurred to him, or so I in my naïveté thought. He rubbed his chin. Knowing I was playing a losing game of this mad chess, that most certainly the patron had played it many times before and always won, I decided at least to attack with a knight. “What if I took both numbers 15 and 16?” I asked. “How much would that be?” “You mean you’d take both rooms. Ah, then you would be comfortably off, very comfortably.” He quoted me a price. I shook my head. “Far too much,” I said. “I’m afraid with great reluctance I’ll have to book the room down the street I saw earlier,” I lied. “Which hotel?” he asked. I knew that if I gave him the name, he’d know I was lying. I moved my knight once again, its aim unclear, to me at least, and hopefully to him. “I can’t remember the name,” I said, frowning. “You know, two blocks toward the Seine, then one block left, toward the Institut.” He looked flummoxed. “Lovely patron there, very friendly. Loves Americans.” Even more perplexed. “I’ll tell you what,” he said, and I’m sure this was not his final offer, “I’ll let you have both rooms for fifteen thousand francs per month.” “Twelve thousand,” I countered, “and I’ll give you the money tout de suite—immediately.” Knowing the French now as I did not then, I suspect the temptation of cash on the barrelhead swayed him more than the counteroffer itself. He extended his hand, I thought to shake mine, but actually to receive the twelve thousand francs without further ado. Thus it was that having clearly turned my back on New England and its conscience-filled customs, in which bargaining was looked upon with disdain, I became the proud possessor, a stone’s throw from St. Germain and the Latin Quarter, of what amounted to a two-room suite, all 140 square feet of it, overlooking the rooftops of Gay Paree. The world was my oyster. The only drawback was that my brilliant bargaining had eaten a mammoth hole in my budget. Let’s see now, twelve thousand francs: How much is that in dollars? Okay, divide by four hundred: yes, thirty dollars a month. What the hell, you only live once.
The Tender Hour of Twilight Page 13