A Pinch of Time

by Claude Tatilon

  Uncle was beating the foliage with a stick when a small convoy of German soldiers came by – four or five trucks flanked by two sidecars fitted with machine guns – wearing fatigues, heavy helmets, and gas masks on their chests.

  In the past months, the actions of the occupying army had grown in intensity, and stories were told of the terrible things they did. We were in that dark period during which, feeling victory slipping through their fingers, the Nazi chiefs stopped at nothing to reverse the tide. In the cities of the South, the German Gestapo and French Militia [3] let loose, shooting so-called “terrorists” – more often than not, imaginary ones – on sight and executing hundreds of hostages. And in Germany, where the deported were found, the cleansing had begun; the concentration camps were turned into extermination camps. But France didn’t know that yet.

  As the Krauts passed by, much to our great surprise, Uncle suddenly brandished his stick and started yelling incomprehensibly. “Long live…!” Smack! The stick against the tree. “Long Live…!” Smack and smack again, he hit the poor walnut tree as hard as possible.

  “Uncle’s gone completely calu!” Gérard’s diagnosis was immediate. I could hear the concern in his voice, and I was worried, too. Uncle’s breathless explanations, once the trucks had disappeared and he’d calmed down, didn’t really reassure us. He caught his breath and explained more slowly. I learned two new words as a result: a gaule, a noun meaning “a stick, a pole, often used for hitting,” and gauler, a verb of the same family, “often used with an object designating a tree or fruit.”

  “A direct object!” Gérard gave me his superior look to remind me that even if the vagaries of our lives brought us together in the same classroom, I should never forget that he was in the older boys’ division.

  That same morning, we learned about a general who would cleanse the shame of French collaboration: Charles de Gaulle’s name had been etched into our minds forever. The name already had an important place in my father’s heart and, once he returned from the camps, he would unconditionally honour it during his long years in the Gaullists’ ranks.

  Back home, Roger’s strange behaviour would be illuminated – at least to Gérard who, that night, spent a long time patiently explaining the situation so I would understand and finally fall asleep. Roger had told my mother how, when the German column passed by, he saw red and spontaneously echoed the cries and gesticulations of the courageous citizens of Marseille who, a year and a half earlier, had paraded down the Canebière, brandishing large sticks in the face of the perplexed German soldiers who had just arrived in the free zone that had become, that quickly, the southern zone.[4]

  The walnuts were presented to my mother in a beautiful tin-plated box that had once contained LU cookies. Accompanied by a large bouquet of flowers – in the centre of which was a purple-blue thistle in bloom – tied together with a red ribbon that would have had a better effect if Uncle had thought of ironing it first. And then, a jar half-filled with alcohol, which must have represented a good litre of pastis that he had made from various aromatic herbs.

  As Maman looked on curiously, Uncle made an incision in each nut with his pocket-knife and dropped them into the jar.

  “My pretty, you’ll have to wait a little. Your present won’t be ready for another two weeks.”

  “You’re going to make nut wine in fifteen days, and that, with no wine?”

  “Not at all!”

  “A homemade aperitif, then?”

  “Nope!”

  Mum’s the word for two weeks. Then, ceremoniously, jar in hand – around which he’d tied a blue ribbon this time, perfectly ironed.

  “Your gift, my princess!”

  “What’s he giving your mother?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Do you drink it, Roger?”

  “No, you wear it!”

  “Wear it? How?”

  “Like nylons, on your legs, on special occasions. Tonight, for instance, to go dancing at Chez Archiloque.”

  It was a pretty little bistro by the village bridge, with a long, tree-shaded terrace that gave onto the river that leaped over rocks in small waterfalls. These days, the bistro houses a restaurant, now named À la bonne écrevisse. To prove their dedication to the crustacean, a large ceramic crayfish on a wooden crest looks down from the sign. And you can still dance on the terrace on fine summer nights.

  “Stockings! And run-proof ones to boot!”

  Maman carefully began colouring her legs. Then Uncle – rather enthusiastically, too! – took up an eyebrow pencil and drew, in a perfectly straight line, starting very high underneath her skirt, all the way down the curve of her leg. The vertical line did perfectly well as a seam. A real vamp!

  “Maybe you should colour your hair platinum blonde, too.”

  Uncle Roger hadn’t invented the procedure, a well-known one, but his success with my mother was no less heartfelt.

  FOURTEEN

  Heavy clouds over France. Since the June 6th landing on the Normandy beaches, the invader, fearing a second landing from the Mediterranean that would flank them, increases his pressure.

  Everywhere, in cities and villages, people suffered terrible reprisals. Like in Oradour-sur-Glane. Saturday, June 10, 1944, at eight in the morning, when tanks entered the village located seventeen kilometres from Limoges.

  The hay had just been cut, the barns were chock full of it. Around the village, a group of soldiers beat the surrounding fields to push the citizens towards the centre. The soldiers were calm and told the villagers they were there for a simple identity check. The villagers, not knowing they were facing special units that had recently distinguished themselves in Russia in the art of civilian extermination – the armoured division SS Das Reich, of infamous name – offered no resistance.

  By early afternoon, the entire population had been rounded up on the fairgrounds, including students under the supervision of their teachers. The men were separated from the women and children, then divided into six groups. They were escorted to the hay-filled barns. Grenades were thrown inside. Machine gunners posted around the barns mowed down any would-be escapees. The women and children were brought to the church. Explosives and hay were set in the nave. More machine gunners in front of the doors…

  In total, 642 victims, including 246 women and 207 children. Only five men and one woman would miraculously survive the massacre.

  In the countryside, violence raged. Like the battle of the Vercors, where resistance fighters were shelled by low-flying Fock Wulfs 190s and Junkers 88s with their painted swastikas. They were surrounded and assaulted from July 21 to 24 by the Alpen, the infamous Bavarian alpine battalion, specially trained for mountain operations.

  Before the Provence landing, the Vercors plateau was to be used as a deployment zone for paratroopers who’d be dropped behind enemy lines. Three thousand resistance fighters without heavy weaponry defended the position: more than nine hundred dead among them and the surrounding civilian population.

  But Provence would not be outdone. Jo, who’d eluded capture in the May 1943 arrests and would later turn up in the Sainte-Baume hills, told us how, one month before the second Allied landing, the Germans would execute, once again with the utmost savagery, twenty-nine members of the Provençal Resistance cell – André Aune (“Berthier” or “Marceau”), Albert Chabanon (“Valmy”), Paul Codaccioni (“Kodak”), Jules Moulet (“Bernard”), the Barthélemy brothers, who gave their glorious names to two streets in Marseille, and others as well from neighbouring départements that they honoured through their valorous sacrifices.

  “Ratted out, arrested and sent to Rue Paradis. No doubt tortured, then sent on a ride in a truck to that little valley between Signes and Cuges. I was a few kilometres from there. Our cell was aching for a fight and we were ready to take it to the Krauts, who were probably losing faith in their rotten regime… They forced them to dig their own graves! Our brave boys were belting out La Marseillaise! We were told all this by the only witness, a lumberja
ck from Cuges, Maurice Percivalle, who was working near there.”

  Today, the mass grave of Signes, located in the Valley of Martyrs, is a national necropolis where, on the 18th of July every year, a touching ceremony, which I attended twice during the 1970s with my Popaul, takes place.

  “Executed one after the other, slowly, without a blindfold. And without the coup de grâce, as we were able to determine from the bodies – mouths open, hands full of dirt, fingers digging into the bloody mud… Less than a month later, on August 12th, they were offered some company: nine new individuals shot by firing squads, probably executed by the same soldiers with the same cruelty. The bastards! The valley hadn’t been chosen by accident; they knew there were a lot of us in the surrounding area. They thought they could dampen our patriotic spirit. Idiots!”

  Some of the larger cities soon started revolting: Lyon, Grenoble, Marseille, Toulon. Marseille, whose old neighbourhoods were already flattened and its transporter bridge burned, had its port mined – ready to blow… The battle would be a terrible one.

  Without a word, Uncle Roger decided to leave. On July 29th, he went to Toulon with his brother-in-law.

  “I knew it, vaï, that you’d leave, too…”

  “T’en faguès pas, Mimi, I’ll be careful! But I have to defend my home,” he explained.

  My mother returned to her nightly sobbing, and the home front recovered its old sadness.

  “Here we go again! She’s crying again, your poor mother!”

  “I know. She isn’t very lucky with her men.”

  FIFTEEN

  On August 15th, Radio Londres, the French-language program broadcast by the BBC, announces that Gaby va se coucher dans l’herbe. A coded message: Operation Dragoon is set into motion. The Allies – helped by an important contribution by the Free French: 260,000 men, more than half of the total forces under the command of General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny – land near Fréjus. By nightfall of August 27th, Toulon is recaptured from the Germans. Marseille follows on August 28th. The occupier loses his foothold. He will be pursued and driven out of France along with the Vichy regime and its despicable motto, “Work, Family, Homeland,” will never be heard again. Finally, the French will truly understand it to mean renunciation, paternalism, isolation. The truer words of the 1789 revolution will be reborn and heard once more: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.”

  Pride and fraternity? Not always.

  By early September, the word “purification” is heard in conversations and is open to interpretation. After Aix, Marseille, Riez, and many other cities of the South, Moustiers would also participate in the fashion of the day.

  “Gérard, what are they going to do to those women in the truck?”

  “They’re going to shear them.”

  “Shear them? Like sheep?”

  “Yes, like animals.”

  “And why are they going to shear them?”

  “Because they went to bed with Germans.”

  “Germans? Like Franz?”

  “No, Franz isn’t German, he’s from Alsace.”

  “But he speaks German, he even told me so. And when he speaks French, it’s like he was speaking German.”

  “Not German, coucourde, Alsatian!”

  “And why are they going to shear those women?”

  “Are you deaf? I just told you: they went to bed with Germans. Right over there, at the Hôtel du Relais.”

  “I don’t want them to get sheared. Lucie is on the truck. I know Lucie, she’s nice. She gave us chocolate, remember?”

  “It was German chocolate!”

  “Well, maybe you didn’t like it, huh? You even ate half my bar!”

  The village bridge is swarming with people: almost all of Moustiers is there with the mayor, Monsieur Audibert, draped in his tricoloured sash. A lot of people from nearby places, too: Riez, Valensole, Puimosson, Les Salles, Bauduen, and La Palud… The truck is parked right in middle of the bridge. On the truck, sitting on chairs, exposed like strange creatures, four poor women, heads lowered, hands tied behind their backs. You’ll never find an intelligent crowd, and this one is no exception. Some come closer to get a better look, from below, the way you’d look at a monkey in a cage. They stick their tongues out, thumb their noses, or make obscene gestures. Everyone talks loudly to show off and they bellow insults. Then comes the master of ceremonies.

  No one had requested the services of Malou, the town hairdresser, to do the dirty work. She has too soft a touch. In any case, she would have refused. A shepherd was called on instead. He would know how to shear them without any niceties.

  He looks at the women with the same benevolent eye as the one he casts upon his animals when he takes them by the back to lighten them of their load. The forces, which he pulls from a scabbard at his belt (the large scissors used to shear sheep) and brandishes for all to admire, were, for the young child I was, the paragon of every instrument of torture, as fearful as the poison apple given to Snow White by the wicked witch.

  The sudden power he’s acquired makes him mean and sadistic, as if he’d taken cruelty lessons from Himmler’s SS, terminator division. Now for the first one! A sudden calm comes over the audience. The shearer stands behind the frightened woman – it’s not Lucie, thank God – tilts her head roughly, chin to chest, and begins his job, cutting into the meat of it, the way he’d do with the fleece of some ordinary sheep, the way he’d trim, with a billhook, tufts of lavender. The clicking sound of steel in the silence. Then the uproar again: hysterical cries, mocking laughter, the crowd buzzes with insults and jibes.

  I have to make an effort to swallow my tears. I make myself small, I hunch my shoulders, better to contain my emotions. Don’t cry in front of everyone! Like my mother, I’ll wait until I’m alone in my room. And don’t cry in front of Gérard! He’s imitating the adults, laughing out loud, happily joining in the shouted insults and jibes. Deep down, we live in two separate worlds, Gérard and I – he already on the cusp of adulthood and I still protected, for a short while at least, by the barrier of childhood. My mother has to quiet him down several times, then she drags us, him by the ear and me by my hand, far from this patriotic battleground of fallen hair.

  Poor Lucie! I can still picture her crestfallen face, broken by the weight of her remorse – a face that has collapsed and been undone, that will now smile only through a fog of shame. I can ask myself all I want: did those women truly betray their husbands, their brothers, their fathers? While they were enjoying themselves, were their men resisting the barbarians, were they fighting, suffering, dying…? Wait a minute! In Moustiers, most men were happy to be sunshine patriots within the walls of their village. Among those four women, how many were widows? None. Married? Only one, Denise Lemoine: her husband abandoned her with two young children (Jean and Martine, who went to Moustiers’ elementary school in the same division with me). He went to live with another woman, an Italian… Weren’t the Italians our enemies? Strange. As for the others, not even sixty years between the three of them! But, I would have been told, they still betrayed their country! That was treason? By betting on love, they gave hope to life. Okay, sure, maybe by risking a few little German bastards! Which meant that Gilbert, Lucie’s baby, was a Nazi. We should exterminate him to purify our race… And if your mother had loved a Kraut instead of Roger, what would you have said? What a stupid allegation! My mother? Don’t try to escape the problem. Her husband was in the hands of the SS, so sure it would have been betrayal. But those other women… Don’t you remember the Germans from Moustiers who would come and take pictures from the bridge and show us photos of their families?

  What would Uncle have done, had he been there and not in Toulon? Applauded or booed this appalling spectacle?

  And my father, had he been there, would he have taken Paul Éluard’s side?

  Go figure why

  For me, my remorse was

  The broken woman who remained

  On the pavement

  The reasonable victim


  With her torn dress

  And the eyes of a lost child

  Lost crown, disfigured [5]

  Would he have been on the side of George Brassens, or on that of the “hair-splitters?” Like Brassens, would he have dared pick up a kiss curl from the mud and slip it into the lapels of his coat? I never asked him the question.[6]

  Despite everything he suffered, I still think my father, had he been on the bridge that day, would never have sided with the “braid-cutters.” Am I wrong, Popaul? Despite Juan, legless at sixteen, miraculously pulled from a crematory oven at Buchenwald by an American soldier, his two legs already gone up in smoke. I saw that Spaniard in February 1946, at the centre for deportees that my father was running at the time. He would drag himself along on his cart by furiously punching the ground. Despite all the horrors I heard him describe, my father did not believe that his fellow man was fundamentally good or evil – only capable of becoming one or the other depending on the circumstances. “The bastards and the saints are cut from the same cloth…” An unconditional optimist, he preferred to consider our species in a flattering light. He would often recount – with much enthusiasm and pride – the story of his friend Ludovic Caraco, whom I knew well. They had suffered their long travels together.

  Not a bird sings out to cheer us.

  Oaks are standing gaunt and bare.

  We are the peat bog soldiers,

  Marching with our spades to the moor. [7]

  We are the peat bog soldiers,

  Marching with our spades to the moor.

  One day, in one camp or another, Caraco, whose faith in God was unwavering, came up with the idea, in order to get an extra bowl of soup for a friend who was in very bad shape, of betting his life by challenging an unshakable-looking guard. “If I toss my cap on the other side of the line that we aren’t allowed to cross under penalty of death, and I go fetch it, you give me more soup. If you haven’t shot me, of course.” A harsh look, and the deal was settled with an arrogant sneer. Caraco slowly took his cap off as the German soldier sighted him. Caraco fingered the striped cap before throwing it as far as he could. The cap fell a good five metres over the line. The guard snarled and muttered something. Then Caraco, walking backwards, gazing directly into the guard’s eyes, approached the line, then crossed it, leaned down… The guard’s fingers tensed on the trigger. But the snarl was gone now, and his eyes were wide open. Caraco crossed back over the line, walking proudly, cap in hand, and went straight to the guard to demand his prize. He shook the German’s sweaty hand. “God bless you!”