A Pinch of Time

by Claude Tatilon

  A picture, an old picture

  Of my youth.

  What is left of our love letters?

  Of springtime, and our moments together

  […]

  Happiness withered, hair in the wind…

  Stolen kisses, dreams undone…

  What is left of it all?

  Please tell me.

  The jury was in tears: first prize was a tie!

  To satisfy the public who begged for more:

  — Good morning, my dear lady

  — Good morning, my dear man…

  Marseille, the fall of 1945. The radio was finally free, and everyone was basking in the euphoria of the Liberation. Sunday mornings, I remember it well: Aunt Henriette would do the weekly housework, scrubbing everything hard as she listened to “Listeners’ Request” – people who’d call in to ask for La Petite Diligence or Sombreros et mantilles, for their favourite Pierre or their sweet Pierrette. A bit of dusting the furniture, the cabinet, the wireless set, the edges of the paintings, the large cabinet mirror; then up the stepladder to dust the top of the cabinet. Rub, rub, frenetically, rhythmically – The little stagecoach / From here to the days of old – the red kitchen tiles, the black and white ones in the corridor, the oak parquet in the bedrooms. “Don’t come in, Nico, it’s still wet!” I’ll wait day and night / I’ll wait forever…

  As she prepared the Sunday feast, Grandma would join the chorus:

  Ramona

  I dreamed a beautiful dream!

  Ramona,

  We travelled together, my queen…

  Ah! A glass of white wine we drink

  In the shade of the arbour we think…

  Oh, her feet were as small as can be,

  Valentine! Valentine!

  How much joy these songs brought! “Never again,” they seemed to say. Which goes to show…

  My cousins, a few years later. Lili, a tragic soprano: singing lessons, a professional voice, she missed out on her career because of the intransigence of a husband who refused to open his nightingale’s cage. Jean, her brother: the same talent but without the effort, he dabbled in small songs, never seeing them through… Then to everyone’s surprise, on the day of Jean’s marriage, here comes a new one with an angel’s voice: Félix, Gérard’s older brother! He makes his way to the centre of the dance floor. No stage fright, no embarrassment, just composure and serenity! We’re all astonished: how is it possible? Where has he been hiding that voice? He does Montand, thumbs hooked under his suspenders for effect, loose-limbed, strolling down the Grands Boulevards. And then Trénet, a real hepcat, a rose in his hat (borrowed from Henriette), rowing in La Mer. In Pigalle, Ulmer meandering, clippity-clop, with his friend Dudan. Borrowing an Italian straw hat from Virginie, Mireille, on vacation, follows her own sweet way that hints of hazelnut. Then Alibert, who just pinched Uncle Émile’s smoke, is already missing, oh fan! his home: Adieu, Venice of Provence! Trénet returns now, hatless, choked up and pale, shedding a tear for old Ménilmontant where long ago he left his heart. Then a final curtain call: Douce France! Bravo, Fèli! A revelation, a triumph!

  Those songs, sung over and over, one Sunday to the next, spoke to me of my mother and Roger:

  Oh, the blue Java

  The prettiest of all…

  – the one that enchants lovers, that they danced to, eyes locked, at Chez Archiloque or on the square before the church.

  And they spoke of me too, in Au Lycée Papillon:

  Student Dominique, you are tops in French History, tell me all about Vercingétorix…Mister Superintendent, I know it all by heart! And you know geography? Then name all the départements! Mister Superintendent, I know it all by heart!

  These songs of my youth told me of pleasures to come, with Couché dans le foin:

  Lying in the hay

  With the sunlight shining

  And a bird I hear singing

  Not too far away…

  I have your hand in mine

  And our fingers weave together…

  The songs spoke of a great journey that would change my life:

  Ma cabane au Canada…

  Songs that made me sad, like Roses Blanches:

  Today is Sunday, you know

  So here, my dear mother

  Take these white roses

  You, who love them so!

  For when I’ll be older…

  And others, like La Valse des Regrets, would teach me poetry:

  The organ of night

  Moans to the moon

  And the breeze

  With its bow

  Sings the waltz of regret…

  The vessel softly sings

  On the satin water

  To where it goes, to which dream

  To which uncertainty

  Of destiny…

  The weight of words, the power of imagery… Gare au gorille! I was preparing myself for a most important meeting:

  You’ll never forget her,

  No, you never will

  The first girl

  You take in your arms

  It was a good thing

  (Oh, my heart, do you remember?)

  How could I forget her, haughty despite her low station – she was a milkmaid. If only you’d known her… The girl and the song would arrive almost at the same time, in 1953.

  ELEVEN

  A rainy day in Moustiers. We were upstairs, bored, with nothing to do. In the first little room where we didn’t like to play – it was always colder and more humid than the other two because there was no window – we made an important discovery: on top of the old dresser was a large metal box we hadn’t seen before.

  It was forty centimetres long and heavy to get down. Though rusty in spots, it was still a handsome box. Its lid, with its bright red paint, impressed us. On its topmost edge, in pale blue letters set out in a half-circle, we read: OLIVE OIL SOAP. Beneath, in small yellow letters following the same curve: 100% Authentic. In the centre of the lid, in yellow capital letters as large as the other ones but running horizontally, the name of the soap-maker: FÉLIX EYDOUX. Well-centred beneath, his place of residence in small black letters: Marseille. Set between the arc and the horizontal line of the capital letters was a large oval medallion of the Virgin. On both sides of the medallion, two gold medals, head and tail, attested to the brand’s fame. Beneath the name, a bird’s eye view of the Eydoux soap factory – “a steam-run factory producing 35,000 kilograms of soap every day” – with three large stacks belching dark clouds of smoke that disappeared into a crystal sky, thanks to the strong wind that blew from right to left. This swell red and gold chromo with pale blue highlights had everything we liked. It especially pleased Gérard who had become, since the success of his surprising landscape, the uncontested artist of the house, his ego further enlarged by my mother’s constant flattery, since she was only a lowly copyist.

  Once we opened the box, its contents intrigued us even more. We found headphones with their wires rolled around them and, underneath, a small black board made of an unknown material on which were attached various objects – in particular, a small glass tube containing a sort of black pebble with a bluish tinge.

  “Qu’es aco?”

  “I don’t know. Uncle’ll tell us tonight.”

  “Kids, you’ve discovered a crystal radio set!”

  “What’s a crystal?”

  “It’s that little thing there.”

  “It runs on a rock?”

  “Not exactly a rock, a mineral that acts as a diode and a capacitor. The antenna is made of copper wire, and it captures the radio waves and sends them to the capacitor, which turns them into the energy it needs to read the radio signal.”

  “Boudi! That’s complicated!”

  “Uncle, can you make the crystal set work?”

  “I might be able to.”

  “How are you going to do it?”

  “Here we have earphones… And on the base, a series of instruments...”

  “What’s the base mad
e of, Uncle? It’s not wood and it smells strange.”

  “It’s ebonite. A material made from rubber.”

  “But it’s hard, and rubber is soft.”

  “Hard, but easy to drill through, and it’s also a great insulator. Let’s look at the instruments. Here you have…”

  What a teacher our uncle was! He knew how to pique our curiosity.

  “If we use it properly, with this model (it was an old 1925 “Wireless” model made by Oudin), we should be able to tune in to radio stations a few hundred kilometres from us. Maybe even the English BBC.”

  “Even Marseille?”

  “Even Marseille. As long as we solidify the antenna. The antenna is this piece of copper wire. We’ll need at least another thirty metres of it.”

  “Do you have copper wire?”

  “No, but I do have an idea… We’ll stretch it horizontally between the three rooms and mount it on the roof. We’ll need another ten metres for the ground. We’ll pass it through there, through the window, and tie it downstairs, on the water faucet.”

  “What’s the ground, Uncle?”

  “It’s the opposite of the sky, idiot!”

  “Oh, Gérard, stop it.”

  The illustration of the virtues of repetition: Uncle would explain and explain again, tirelessly. “I’ve just told you that… Clearly, you didn’t understand. Listen again: this part is…” And always with the patience of a monk for whom nothing matters but the illuminating of his manuscript. He would find comparisons we could understand.

  “A mineral is a combination of more than one metal – like soup that’s a combination of more than one vegetable cooked together.”

  “But a mineral is hard, not liquid.”

  “No, not liquid; a mineral is solid. In the world, there are three different forms of matter, which we call its ‘states.’ Take water, for instance: it is liquid when you go and get it at the fountain, but it becomes solid when it freezes.”

  “That’s ice.”

  “Yes, ice. When you boil a litre of water to make soup, the part that evaporates is in a gaseous state.”

  “That’s steam.”

  “Steam is a gas?”

  “It is water in its gaseous state.”

  The virtue of a well-presented digression.

  “Now, when a piece of galena, the main mineral in a crystal set, detects a wave transmitted by a radio, it’s like when your ear detects a sound from close up – the goat next door, for example. Except that, with galena, the sound that it captures – meaning the radio waves – comes from very far away, often hundreds of kilometres.”

  “What’s a wave?”

  “It’s something that moves in regular fashion. When you throw a rock in the Courbon fountain, you see small waves that move from the central point to the perimeter in succession. We say that they’re dis-se-min-a-ting. They’re waves, but visible ones. Sound waves also disseminate from a central point, but they are invisible; only your ears can catch them.”

  Science made easy. What a teacher! And, when necessary: “Are you listening or are you sleeping? Don’t give me a reason to get mad…” The virtue of a righteous reprimand.

  Today, I still remember how to work a crystal set. One of the miracles of childhood: you remember everything that was said, and the brain can store even the smallest details in its young folds – the sui generis smell of ebonite, the indented button under the fingers’ touch, the tiny shifts of the detector on the galena, the few broken words that emerged from the static. The taste of captured words, mulled over in our minds as we tried to understand their meaning. I remember we played a lot with our set, perhaps more than with any other toy, though we were never able to capture a complete sentence – blame the mountain behind the house. Still, considering Uncle Roger and his technical abilities… If he’d been born earlier, he would have invented the Swiss Army knife. Which, just like that, would have become French.

  He would often listen to Les Français parlent aux Français, “From one Frenchman to Another,” with his brother-in-law, both crowding around the tube radio they refused to turn in at the town hall for a receipt. Starting at the end of 1943, wireless sets were verbotten!

  Something big was happening with the Allies. While the French, who felt the noose tightening around their necks, began to think differently about their “saviour,” the old Marshal.

  TWELVE

  Funny how memory works. Proust, of course… The same thing with pistou: when I smell its perfume in the air – just like that! – I remember it all.

  A stampede through the quiet streets of a village heavy with sleep, at siesta time. “Zou boulégan, you’re slowing us down, they’re gonna catch us!”

  Two kids in short pants sitting on the terrace, legs spread apart, face to face, in the shade of the linden. A hot summer day. The game consists of rolling a small ball back and forth, pretending it’s a car, a motorcycle, a tank – a French tank! Block it, then send it back.

  The same children, sitting at the terrace table. They’re staring at an upside-down glass with a wasp inside, flying, trying to escape. No luck: it hits the side of the glass, tries to hold on, falls back down each time.

  The outdoor latrines, squatters in a small roofless shed thrown up in a hurry, leaning against the side of a house. Should have thought of paper, there’s only these large leaves left… Ouch, ouch! “I told you, those are nettles, smarty-pants! Bet you won’t forget the name now!”

  The same kids in the corner of the kitchen, playing ludo. “Hey, Gé! Look at those flies! What are they doing there, stuck together like that?”

  “I can’t tell you, you’re too young.”

  “Why?”

  “Look here, under my nose, you see?”

  “Yeah, it’s dirty.”

  “I’m not dirty, you stinking runt! It’s my moustache.”

  “Your moustache… Well, it’s not big, is it?”

  “A little thin still, sure, but it’s there anyway, which means I’m allowed to be interested in flies-stuck-together-like-that, and you’re not.”

  And that was that.

  Before Moustiers, my mind is a complete blank, a piece of paper on which nothing has been written. If I try to look back, it’s as if I were disappearing into a bank of fog growing ever thicker. At first, a few vague apparitions: my maternal grandfather bouncing me on his knee as he laughed; my handsome father in his sailor uniform, wearing an unclouded smile; a naked child on a sheepskin… But nobody ever moves, and I’m the child. Pictures, only pictures, kept in the family album with others from the same period: my father in fatigues during the “phoney war,” his helmet askew, back against a truck with his buddies as if posing for a Colgate ad (“Sparkling White Teeth!”). Another one of him, at the Fort of Six-Fours, next to an artillery piece, looking concentrated, field glasses in hand… I can search through every fold of my memory, not a single trace of my childhood before the summer of 1943. Only pictures, or objects found later, stories told over and over, like the wonderful “Retreat! Retreat!” story that my entire family loved to tell again and again, especially Gérard. I shouted out this call of defeat towards the end of 1942, while strolling through the pretty Pharo gardens with my family near the entrance to the Old Port. Just then, the cannons from a German battery started a firing exercise. I yelled, “Retreat! Retreat!” And ran off with my father chasing me, catching up to me before I could reach the garden gate…

  If, today, I can remember the apartment in which I first opened my eyes – right above Henriette and Rose’s house, with its two windows giving directly onto the veranda, their terrace, and their oblong garden shaped like a flagship, from which, down a fifty-metre cliff, your eyes could trace every street of the Saint-Victor neighbourhood leading all the way to the sea through the Catalan quarter – if I know every corner of that tiny apartment by heart, it’s because I often took refuge there during my father’s last stay there, from June to December of 1945.

  Only the map of France pinned to the wall
vaguely re-minded me of something.

  “What are those pins on the map, Dad?”

  “They helped me follow the progression of the war.”

  I also had the image of his violin. Unfit for service! Once I knocked it off a chair and stepped on it for no apparent reason. I came upon it later, its soul shattered, unable to offer anything more than pitiful caterwauls. I can still see it today, its pretty orange-red colour with a ladybug finish.

  As time progresses, the fog begins to lift, and once past it, the landscape becomes clearer: the sides of a mountain and the star that hangs between them; the cries of crows amplified by the echo; the scent of lavender; and voices, faces, and a clever cousin… Moustiers always comes back to me with its scent of pistou that reminds me of times past.

  Today, Uncle didn’t go out on the road; there was nothing to transport until Monday. He’ll take the opportunity to work on his truck – brake pads and cylinder head to change. The work will take him through the weekend.

  After the meal, he unfolds that day’s Petit Provençal, Friday, May 26, 1944, brought to Moustiers on the noon bus. He looks at the headlines.

  “The bastards! Enough is enough! We ought to hang ’em all, the whole editorial staff, along with the Doddering Old Man.”

  “Don’t get worked up, Roger! Not when you’re digesting.”

  “You bet! I can’t swallow another one of these damn headlines: New Anglo-American Terror Attack on France… Lyon Suburbs Bombed Again… On the Southern Italian Front, the Germans Break up Savage Attacks and Destroy Sixty-Seven Tanks…

  A man of conviction, Uncle knew nothing about feelings that weren’t absolute. He always preferred the pugnacity of honest speech to the half-truths of mealy-mouthed politicians.

  THIRTEEN

  On May 27, 1944, Marseille suffered its most deadly Allied bombardment – 1,700 deaths. News of it took two days to reach us in Moustiers; there were no newspapers on Sundays. No deaths in our family, only property damage. That same day, Maman turned thirty-two. A birthday that Roger would celebrate in his own way.

  That morning, Uncle had us prepare a present, and a strange one, too: a handful of fresh walnuts that we fetched from a big tree in the lower part of the village, by the side of the road.