We moved down the street barefoot, looking for more people to save. We came upon a group of people standing around the front door of someone’s house. I looked inside, since everyone else was.
I couldn’t believe it. Water was shooting up through the stone floor of the kitchen. Underground springs were coming to the surface. The ground under our village must have had more holes in it than a Swiss cheese!
Meanwhile, the people were sweeping the water out of the house and into the street with brooms and shovels and dustpans. Just as quickly, the kitchen filled up with water again.
“I don’t get it,” my brother said. “Where’s all the water coming from? It’s hardly even raining any more.”
“The problem is in the mountains,” my mother explained. “There were big storms up there last night. That’s where all this water is coming from.”
Marco, the man who ran the grocery store down the street, had another idea.
“It’s not the mountains’ fault. I’ll tell you whose fault it is! That guy Arthur who runs the dam upriver. He fell asleep at the switch and let all the water go by!”
“They spend millions building the dam to keep us from getting flooded. Then they hire some donkey to run it, and he falls asleep,” said our neighbor, Monsieur Mendes.
“Arthur likes his wine too much. That’s the problem,” Marco concluded.
Everybody started arguing about whose fault it was, and complaining about the man who had fallen asleep at the switch. I sure wouldn’t want to be him!
Meanwhile, my brother slipped into the flooded house to look at the underground springs that had taken over the kitchen. Sure enough, as he was bending over and trying to see exactly where the water was coming from, he fell head first, right into it.
Splash!
For a very long couple of seconds, he didn’t get up.
“That’s where the old well is!” Marco shouted.
And he pulled my brother out of the water.
Poor Max. He’d fallen right into the spot where a well had been, in the center of the kitchen. Not only was he soaked, but his knee was bleeding badly. And he was trying really hard not to cry.
“We’d better get you cleaned up,” my mother said to him. “I don’t like the way that cut looks, not with all this dirty water.”
Marco looked at his watch.
“You’re in luck, Madame,” he told my mother. “Dr. Rosalie comes by every day at this time to look after the people in the old folks’ home.”
We stepped outside again. My mother was holding my soaked brother. Just then, a rowboat with two men in it sailed past us. They had a dog with them that was barking its head off. I guess animals don’t like floods.
“How is a doctor going to get here, with all this water?” my mother asked.
“You don’t know Dr. Rosalie. She never misses an appointment. Rain or shine.”
Sure enough, Marco was right. A few minutes later, a Jeep came driving very slowly down the flooded street. Brown water was lapping around the bottom of its doors.
Marco waved his arms and the Jeep stopped, pushing waves of water ahead of it. A woman in a white coat was sitting at the wheel.
“Dr. Rosalie!” Marco shouted. “We have a little emergency for you.”
The woman stepped out. I’d never seen a doctor like her. She was wearing a white coat and high rubber boots past her knees — the kind fishermen wear.
She didn’t waste any time. She asked my brother what his name was, and if he was scared. Then she set him on the hood of the Jeep. She put her doctor’s bag next to him and got to work.
“When a doctor tells you that it’s not going to hurt, do you believe it?” she asked Max.
“No.” He shook his head.
“Smart boy!” she said.
She cleaned his cut and gave him a tetanus shot. That must have hurt! She bandaged up his knee. Then Dr. Rosalie hopped back in her Jeep and splashed down the street.
“We didn’t even pay her,” my mother said.
Marco laughed. “Don’t worry! You’ll see her again. This is a small town.”
The rowboat came past again. This time, the men were paddling as fast as they could the other way.
“The Vidourle’s leaving,” one of the men in the rowboat called out over the barking dog. “The water’s going down!”
I looked down the street. Sure enough, the water was retreating fast, as if someone had pulled the plug in a bathtub.
In fact, the water went down so fast that a small school of silvery fish were stranded on the street. They flopped around on the pavement, wondering where their water had disappeared to.
My brother took a few steps, trying out his new limp. He looked down at his bandage. He was very proud of it.
At the end of the street, we met up with Madame Mendes. She was talking with my mother.
“All this rain makes me think of poor old Madame Chaudeoreille,” she said in a sad voice.
In case you didn’t know, Chaudeoreille means “hot ear.” Can you imagine having that for a name?
“Who is she?” my mother asked.
“That poor old lady who drowned in your house.”
“Who drowned?” my little brother butted in.
“La pauvre dame,” our neighbor said. “Poor lady.”
But she had this happy look in her eyes. She must have been waiting forever for a morning just like this one to tell us the story.
“Her son and daughter-in-law lived upstairs, where you do. But she, you understand, she was in a wheelchair. One night the waters rose, just like this, except much worse. It was night, she couldn’t move, the Vidourle came into the house, her son was upstairs sleeping with his new bride… You can imagine the rest.”
“Do you think her ghost still lives in our house?” my brother asked.
“A ghost?” Madame Mendes said. “I couldn’t say…”
“When did all this happen?” my mother asked.
“Oh, I was just a girl at the time… That would be nearly seventy years ago, maybe more.”
“If there was a ghost, we’d know about it by now,” my little brother decided. He looked relieved.
“Poor old lady,” our neighbor was saying. “When I think of her helpless in her chair, and the waters rising, and her son sleeping upstairs…”
I thought she was going to cry. But right in the middle of her sad story, she reached down and snatched a couple of fish off the pavement. She slipped them into a plastic bag that she just happened to have in her purse. They looked suspiciously like the little fish Madame Mendes and her husband liked to eat.
Just then my father came walking up.
“Well, no one drowned and no one got electrocuted. It’s time for breakfast, kids,” he said. “I’m starving.”
“We’re not having fish, are we?” I asked.
“Since when do we eat fish for breakfast?”
My mother and I tried to keep from laughing, but it was too late.
As we went into our house, I heard a dog barking and two men complaining in loud voices. I went to the end of our little street to see what was going on. The two men were lugging the heavy rowboat in their arms. And in it, as unhappy as ever, their dog was barking up a storm.
The Great Flood was over.
FIVE
Reading, writing and… fighting!
Two days after the Great Flood, school started.
I was pretty nervous about starting a new school. I had met some of the kids who lived in the village, but this was a big school attended by students from all over the countryside. I would be the only foreigner. My brother wouldn’t be there, since he would be going to the little grade school.
I would be the new kid, le Canadien, the one with the funny accent and the weird parents w
ho didn’t seem to work for a living. All the other kids had parents who grew grapes or built houses or took care of animals. Writing and drawing all day long was not considered real work in this part of the world.
That’s why the school year started slowly in Celeriac. Half the kids were busy harvesting grapes in the vineyards. They did it to help their families and neighbors, and of course they made a little money, too. That came in handy, because there weren’t too many ways for kids to make money in the village. No paper routes or leaf-raking or snow-shoveling like in Montreal.
Little by little, kids started showing up at school with sun-burned faces and purple hands. Some of them even had purple hair, and it wasn’t because they were punk rockers. At the end of the harvest, they “washed” each other all over with grapes. That was their way of celebrating the end of the job.
School turned out to be very different in Celeriac. On the first morning, the kids showed up and shook hands with each other. They introduced themselves, first name and last, very politely, like little businessmen.
But when lunchtime came around, they got together to fight in the schoolyard. They fought like animals! There were no rules. And what’s more, they were allowed to fight. In my school back home, you could get expelled for it. Here, the teachers even supervised the fights!
That was one of the not-very-civilized things about France, which was supposed to be such a civilized place.
I never understood why the kids fought. Everything seemed to follow a kind of secret code that I didn’t get. Maybe they fought because they’d fought the year before, or because their fathers had fought, or their grandfathers before them.
I was lucky, because I had a friend named Daniel, the son of Didier the science teacher, who played on the same soccer team as my father. If someone tried to push me around, Daniel would step in and stop it.
“Not him, he’s a guest,” he would tell the other kid. “You can’t fight a foreigner.”
And just like that, the kid would disappear, like magic.
Daniel knew more about the world than the rest of the kids in the village. His family had traveled. He had even gone dog-sledding with his parents in northern Canada, something I’d never done. Daniel wanted to be an environmentalist, and he said that there was more environment in Canada.
I thought being a foreigner would be a problem, but it actually turned out to be an advantage, especially with the girls.
In Montreal, girls my age wouldn’t talk to boys. But in Celeriac, they weren’t shy at all. Maybe it was because I had a different accent, or maybe it was because I had been to places other kids had never seen, but suddenly I was popular with girls. They would even follow me home in the afternoon and wait for me in front of my house in the morning.
After our first English class, I became even more popular. The English teacher discovered that I spoke English better than she did. She got very embarrassed and upset, and the rest of the kids loved that.
The teacher had another problem, but it really wasn’t her fault. Her name was Madame Grondin. A grondin is an extremely ugly pink fish with big scales and a gigantic mouth and long whiskers. You can see one in the market if you don’t look away in time.
Poor Madame Grondin! Not only did she have a name that made everyone laugh, but her English was really bad. In fact, it was terrible.
She must have learned her English out of a book, and she’d probably never heard the language spoken by real people. I didn’t mean to correct her, but the words slipped out of my mouth before I could stop them.
“Now, children,” she began, “you will use your crayons to write your exercises.”
“A crayon is for coloring in coloring books,” I told her. “You want to say pencil.”
She looked totally outraged.
“Perhaps monsieur would like to learn the class himself?” she suggested.
“No, but I could teach it,” I corrected her.
I realized I’d gone too far when her eyes started bulging out.
“Pardon, Madame,” I said.
But by then, everyone — especially the girls — was laughing and applauding.
After that, every afternoon there would be a knock on our door. My mother stood behind me, smiling, as I opened the door to find a group of girls who wanted help with their English homework. It was embarrassing, the way she was so delighted that I had visitors. But luckily she didn’t hang around too long. Not like Max, who stuck to me like glue. After they finished their homework, the girls would ask me about the English songs they listened to. What did the words mean? It must be strange to listen to music and not understand the words.
My brother wouldn’t stop teasing me about the girls. I never fought at school, but I made up for it by fighting with him at home.
I also helped Rachid and Ahmed and some of the other soccer players. After our homework was done, they would lend me a pole and we would go fishing in the river that had calmed down after the flood. The little fish we caught tasted like mud, and you’d have to be dying of hunger to eat one. But it was lots of fun. I never got to go fishing in Montreal.
Little by little, I began to feel at home. My mother started to give free drawing lessons to the kids on Wednesday mornings, when there was no school and their parents were working. My father joined the village soccer team, even though he had never played soccer in his life.
One day when I was hanging out on the square, kicking the ball back and forth with Rachid, one of the red-faced men who spent his days in the café shouted out to me, “Hey, kid, you play better than your father! You should give him some lessons.”
Well, at least my father was trying!
One afternoon, as I was coming back from school with my friends, I could hear my father’s typewriter chattering away through the open window.
“I guess your father doesn’t have a job,” Ahmed said. “Mine doesn’t either.”
“My father’s a writer,” I told him. “He works all the time, even on vacations.”
“That’s not a real job,” Rachid said. “He doesn’t have a schedule or a boss or anything.”
“People wonder how your family gets along with neither of your parents working,” Ahmed added. “At least my mom works.”
“So does mine. She writes stories and draws pictures.”
Ahmed, Rachid and my new friend Florian, Dr. Rosalie’s son, looked at each other and shrugged. They weren’t convinced.
“Then how come your mother rides around on her bike in the mountains every afternoon? My mother would never do that,” Florian laughed.
What could I say? My parents were different. Anyway, I was used to having them embarrass me.
One of the ways you could fit in was to participate in the local cultural activities. Nearly all of them had to do with food.
Sometimes we went to the sea coast, an hour away by car. But instead of lying on the beach or flying kites, we had to participate in clam-digging expeditions. The clams were no bigger than your thumbnail, and you caught them by running a rake through the sand, which had a mesh bag attached to it.
Other times we went into the mountains, where chestnut trees grew. We filled sacks full of chestnuts for roasting.
The only thing we didn’t participate in was the boar hunt. A boar is a kind of wild pig that likes to eat grapes. Actually, they look like pigs with tusks, and they walk on their tiptoes, as if they were wearing high-heeled shoes. To hunt them, you had to have a licence. Luckily, we didn’t have one.
When it rained, we went snail-hunting, because snails just love rain. I followed my parents through the rocky vineyards as they and their village friends pinched the snails off the wilted leaves of the grapevines and dumped them into buckets. Snail-hunting was easy, but things got more complicated when Madame Mendes showed up after the hunt with a wire mesh cage and set it up in our kitchen
.
“Il faut les faire baver,” she cackled. “You have to make them drool.”
“Snail-drool?” said Max. “Disgusting!”
He immediately tried to imitate a drooling snail. He was right. It was disgusting!
Meanwhile, Madame Mendes dumped several pailfuls of snails into the cage.
That was my introduction to Celeriac snail technology. After you caught the snails, which wasn’t hard because they aren’t too fast, you had to help them get rid of whatever was in their little snail stomachs before you could eat them. They had to drool, as Madame Mendes put it.
While they were busy drooling, we were supposed to feed them herbs so that they would taste good when their big day came, which was in a couple of weeks. That was my brother’s job. But every time he gave them their branches of rosemary and thyme, a few of them would “accidentally” escape.
He would run around the kitchen as if his pants were on fire.
“Get back here!” he called. “I’ll catch you yet!”
What a clown!
Crunch!
One of us would dash into the kitchen to see what was going on and step on a snail. That usually happened just before dinner. Nothing like squished snail on a stone floor to take away your appetite!
One Friday afternoon in the late autumn, a sunny day after several days of rain, Marco stopped me as I was walking past his grocery store.
“Mon garçon,” he began, “do you know what it smells like?”
And he sniffed the air and smiled.
That’s the way people were in Celeriac. They always asked questions you couldn’t answer.
I sniffed the air, too. It smelled like air to me.
“No,” I admitted.
“It smells like mushrooms,” he said happily. “Definitely, it smells like mushrooms.”
“I see.”
“How would you like to go mushroom-hunting tomorrow?”
“All right,” I said. “But don’t you have to work in your store?”
On the Road Again Page 4