“Didn’t you see that I’d hung the other bag on the chair?”
“I don’t know, Uncle…”
“That’s all you have to say?”
Sheepish, indeed, for that was all I had to say.
“What are we going to eat now?”
Gérard was worried. But he shouldn’t have been, because Uncle was always full of ideas.
“Let’s keep walking. Higher up, we should find Antonin the shepherd.”
“Pau-Parlo?”
“Yes, Pau-Parlo. I’m sure he’ll have something to nibble on.”
Another half-hour of walking on an empty stomach. The vegetation grew sparser and the trees gave way to meagre pastures, studded with small flowers. Far away, sheep and goats stood in the grass, not unlike a manger scene.
“Tell me, Uncle. Is that black dog over there mean?”
“No, that’s Riquet, he knows me.”
I was happy that Gérard had asked the question and especially happy he had asked it before me. And relieved at the answer. As predicted, Riquet bounced over to us with a friendly wag of his tail. He came and licked Uncle Roger’s hand. Uncle kneeled down to converse with the dog and introduce us. Riquet approached, head down, to sniff our legs. Uh-oh, his tail stopped… But all’s well: he just needed time to wind up the machine again and his tail started wagging allegretto.
“Hey, Tonin!”
The man sitting in the shade of a small tree answered without getting up.
“Adiéu, coulègo!”
We walked towards him, escorted by Riquet, whose good intentions could be read in his tail.
“The hunt’s brought us here… Been a while, eh?”
“Coumprèni qué!”
“Gérard, open the game-sack. Look inside, Tonin!”
Antonin raised his arm halfway to show his admiration. But having unlearned speech from his constant solitude, he didn’t add words to his gesture.
“You better believe it’s not over yet.”
“Belèu.”
Maybe. Not an optimist, the shepherd. He must not know Uncle well enough.
“Took us almost three hours to get here…”
“Tres ouro?”
“We went by Courbon’s olive trees to get away from the rest of the pack. You better believe they’re shooting down near Ducasse’s land.”
“Li a de lèbre, au dabas.”
“Sàbi, maï… with the kids, it isn’t safe.”
Close up, the man looked much older than Uncle Roger. Almost as old as the landscape: his face gullied, his features chiselled, and a thick white moustache.
At his feet, a sheep that had been sleeping got up, walked a few steps away, then stuck its nose in the grass. We sat down. It was good to rest in the shade after all our effort. Calm settled over me – but not my stomach, which growled hungrily and accused me of neglect. But soon it would stop complaining. Not just because of Antonin’s gifts – he offered each of us a small sheep’s-milk cheese, dry, the way I like it, and a large piece of dark bread, almost as hard as the cheese – but because of a small detail that repelled me from my first bite and ruined my appetite for the rest of the day.
Antonin chewed, which meant he stuffed a large piece of tobacco into his mouth and, just like a sheep, ruminated it with care, moving it from one side of his mouth to the other with a grimace that twisted his jaw and made the silver hairs of his beard stand up. The thorn in my side, if I can put it that way, was that, after a few minutes of meticulous mastication, he started spitting out large wads with the regularity of an aerial barrage. With strength and precision, his spit hit a flat rock a few metres away, once white, but now turning yellow. But he spat carefully: we never came under fire from his barrage.
I can’t find the words to depict Gérard’s half-hidden look of disgust (my cousin always had a refined appetite, and even a year of army grub in the Algerian Aurès could not discipline it).
I discreetly made my food disappear, even the fig that was supposed to be my dessert, into Riquet’s open and available mouth; I could swear the dog winked at me.
Uncle didn’t seem to notice. His voracious jaws stopped only to maintain the conversation that so far had been more like a monologue.
“Been here a while, Tonin?”
“Un pau.”
“A few weeks?”
“Vinto-sèt jou.”
“You’ll stay here how long, then?”
“Jusco lei proumiés jou d’ivèr.”
That would be the final confidence of our loquacious friend who, as we were getting ready to leave, bestowed a half-smile on us and touched his cap with two fingers. “Adessias, Tonin!”
The sun was high in the sky now, and it was past noon by the time we got back on the road. It would take us two hours to return to Moustiers, and we’d promised my mother to be back by early afternoon. She must already be worried.
A pheasant, a nice rabbit, a woodcock, a blackbird, a dozen pine mushrooms, a large head of thyme, marjoram, and rosemary – and, of course, the fresh air, the landscape, the emotions, and the rest – certainly made getting up for before the sun and walking twenty kilometres over rough ground worthwhile.
EIGHTEEN
Our lives in Provence had changed profoundly since the Germans cleared out and the war moved away, taking with it its procession of idiocies and atrocities… Although we ate just as badly, we were breathing easier. In our house, every day since Roger’s return was a celebration. There was only one problem. The truces between Gérard and me never lasted long. Our squabbles were endless, sometimes outright mean, but always underscored by a certain tenderness.
“What is it this time, Dodo?”
“You’re mean! You…”
“You’re not going to start again, are you?”
“You never let me talk!”
“You asked me a question, right?”
“Yes…”
“So let me answer! I’ll explain what the teacher told us older and wiser boys.”
“Well, I heard her, too.”
“Sure, the Ant is industrious, but most of all she’s mean and selfish. But the Cicada isn’t lazy.”
“I know, she’s an artist.”
“She sings, that’s her job.”
“And also, she’s generous…”
“Good job, Dodo, you got it!”
“She’s paid to entertain people.”
“Or help them sleep. You always sleep in the afternoon on the terrace, when the cicadas sing under the linden.”
“And you don’t sleep?”
“So even the younger kids in class understood what Madame Dupuis said?”
“Yes, but I’m not sure about Martine and Jean, though.”
“Aren’t you a smart one, Dodo! If your plumage were as pretty as your song…”
“And you, Gé, if your…”
“If my what?”
This time, he didn’t interrupt me. I fell silent, with my mouth wide open like a carp trying to swallow a fly. I could not remember a single line of verse! On that day, I decided I needed to learn the magical words of Jean de La Fontaine by heart.
On January 6, 1945, the day after my eighth birthday, Gérard and I were invited to visit my cousin Jeanne, the wife of Cousin Marcel, Uncle Émile’s first cousin. The couple lived a few minutes away from us in a large house even more rustic than ours – an old farm with a stable beside it and a yard where, all day, a dozen hens would peck at grain and scratch the ground, looking for worms. More numerous than the hens were the scrawny cats that would lie in the sun, sleeping in acrobatic poses, rolled in tight balls or showing their furry tummies.
We made our way there shortly before six, the sky already turning grey. The hens had returned to the henhouse and the cats were beginning to stretch; soon enough, in less than half an hour, night would fall like a stone, and that would be their time. Their ranks increased by others from the four corners of the town, the company of cats would begin their familiar concert. Its principal refrain would be
, as always, the imitation of a baby’s cry. That part of Moustiers was known as “Caterwaul Lane.”
As soon as we entered the heavy front door, my nose picked up an appetizing scent that made my mouth water. In the shadows of the dimly lit kitchen, my eyes were immediately drawn to the halo of light cast by the hearth, where I could discern half-buried baked potatoes in their jackets of ash. They were crackling like firecrackers and sending up small bouquets of sparks. Gérard was already licking his chops.
A surprise was waiting for us. A door opened and in she came, as pretty as a picture, making her dress sway with her hips. It was Dany, our classmate, Madame Dupuis’ daughter and our hosts’ granddaughter – a distant cousin, then, by the ricochet of wedlock, since Émile was our uncle through marriage… Dany laughed loudly at our dumbstruck air, her eyes sparkling, her small nose sweetly turned up, a porcelain mouth and long golden braids: Gérard stared at her like a drowning man would a buoy. When she kissed him, his cheeks turned red.
“It’s my birthday, too. I turned nine the day before yesterday. I’m a year and a day older than you.”
Her blue velvet dress reached halfway down her calves.
Gérard, in an aside, said, “A shame her dress is so long…”
“Why? I think it looks good on her!”
His eyes answered me with a glint of disdain, and from then on, he did not consider me worthy of his confidences.
Our hostess seated us at the table – Dany and I next to each other and Gérard on the other side. It was a children’s supper, and Cousin Jeanne served us. Ah, that great pantry with its creaking doors, its shelves bending under the weight of its provisions, barely visible but never forgotten! Cousin Marcel came and went from one room to the next. Each time he opened the door that led from the kitchen to the stable, we would get a generous whiff of the heavy sui generis odour of Bijou the horse, who made himself heard throughout the meal with his constant kicking against the planks of the partition.
Like all of us, Gérard had a healthy appetite, but I’m not sure he knew what he was eating. The proof: when we got back home, he let me describe the details of our meal.
“We ate so well, Maman! You should’ve seen it! We started with a boiled egg, laid that same day, with bread for dipping that Cousin Marcel cut from a giant loaf. Then Cousin Jeanne gave each of us a big piece of meat.”
“It was salt pork,” Gérard corrected.
“It was this thick!”
“Really?”
“Really! Ask Gérard. She cooked it on the coals with potatoes.”
At our house, potatoes were only for special occasions. My mother had invented a simple way to prepare them that had earned her Roger’s oft-repeated compliments. In season, she’d chop a handful of young linden leaves that she’d mix with a few drops of olive oil to make a doughy substance that we would spread on our boiled potatoes. “What a taste, Mireille! Much more delicate than thyme or rosemary!” Delicate, no doubt about that. Too delicate for Gérard – “It tastes like nothing, Auntie, just good oil!” – and I wouldn’t disagree with him. But I didn’t want to disappoint my mother or contradict Roger, so I deferred my quick judgment and concentrated on the more-than-subtle flavour for which, with a generous effort, I could invent a whole palette of tastes.
“They’re good, these potatoes! Much better than last week’s rugatabas.”
“It’s rutabaga, niston!”
“Stop that! Gérard’s always looking for a fight, Maman. We put real butter on the potatoes and they melted in my mouth!”
“Cousin Jeanne sure spoiled you.”
“She also gave us a green salad. Slightly bitter, but anyway… And to finish it off, we had a big nut cake in the shape of a heart. You should have seen it! With two candles stuck in it, a pink one and a blue one.”
“You forgot the fruit and the bottle of apple juice,” Gérard added, critical as always.
So he had been paying attention to something other than Dany after all. Though throughout the meal, he’d seemed hypnotized by her – especially her precocious blouse, white and impeccably ironed, lifted by two audacious peaks that obviously caught his eye more than our mountains ever could. Even if he did talk about those mountains all the time, promising to climb them as soon as possible.
The night was spent in harmless and merry talk.
When the time came to leave, Gérard rushed to kiss Dany before I could, pushing me aside with a sly elbow to the deltoid. He took her by the shoulders and held her at a distance a second, the better to admire her.
The night was thick and heavy by the time we left our cousins’ home and started to make our way back, interrupting the concert of the cats. Walking in front, Gérard must have had as good vision as they did, since he came to my rescue more than once, bringing me back onto the right path with reassuring strength.
In Provence, 1945 was a year of euphoria. Our life in Moustiers had taken a serene turn. At least we had the semblance of serenity.
NINETEEN
My father’s last station of the cross. Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945, by units of the 42nd and 45th infantry of the 7th American Army, eighteen days after Buchenwald. Two more weeks of waiting in that hell, then evacuation to Paris and accommodation in the Hôtel Lutetia: comfortable, sure, but not yet paradise. My father thought he’d find it in Marseille.
From the Lutetia, he called Uncle Eugène’s office. “Oh, brother! Oh, brother! Oh, Holy Mother of God!” Then a long silence. That’s all Eugène could say to his brother-in-law come back from the dead. My father reached Marseille two or three weeks later because of medical and sanitary measures. He was carrying exanthematic typhus, which had to be treated in Paris. Eugène must have been saddened but relieved by the delay, for it gave him and the family a chance to absorb the events and ready themselves for the return of the prodigal son.
Grandmother Rose and Aunt Marie, her oldest daughter, came to Moustiers as soon as they heard the news. I was eight and half then, and though I hadn’t had a chance to read Corneille yet, I understood the immense pathos of the situation, underscored by my mother alternating between tears and laughter. Aunt Marie remained silent. Gérard, too. His silence impressed me the most. Rose, as always, found the right words. She summed up the situation with clear logic that brought my mother back to harsh reality. “You must speak to Roger as soon as possible. You’ll judge his reaction then. And you’ll see how you yourself react. It’s important for you, for him and for Paul. For now, you’ll stay here with Gérard; he has to finish school. Your sister is going to stay too, and your brother-in-law will have a week off work in the harbour and he’ll come on Saturday. I’m going to take Dominique back to Marseille. His father will need him. Then, when we settle him in and explain everything, it’ll be your turn, daughter, to go and speak to him.”
My mother almost fainted.
“Speak to Paul? How?”
“You’ll do it, that’s all.”
“It’ll be much too hard.”
“Of course it’ll be hard! But not complicated: you’ll let your heart do the talking. In a few days, you’ll see things more clearly, dear. As for you kids, you’ll be separated for a few days, but only until summer vacation. Okay?”
“If we have no choice…”
His feathers ruffled, my cousin resigned himself.
“Yes, Grandma, it’s okay.”
My heart was broken: to leave Gérard, Maman, Roger… Though we were making a big deal of seeing my father again, I wasn’t even sure I knew him.
“Don’t whine, you brat.”
“I’m not whining!”
“Right. You’re not whining, you’re crying.”
As always, Gérard was aggressive, hiding behind big words. But I could see by his face – especially his chin, trembling like apple jelly – that he was sad, too.
“Will you miss me, Gé?”
“Runt! Who do you think I am?”
His chin trembled again.
We ate on the fly: boiled
eggs, grated carrots, tomatoes with salt. Then, rascle on the village bridge.
“Don’t forget your bag, scatterbrain.”
“Agante, niston!”
Gérard threw me the bag. Our goodbyes were brief. My grandmother was already at the terrace gate.
“Come on, dear! No, Marie, all of you, you’re not coming. All right, enough tears. What will the village think of us?”
The church bell had just begun to chime when the bus left the bridge at exactly three o’clock. The bus drove down the swerving curves onto the plain and passed the modest wall of hills, then came to a small city: Riez. We stopped a few minutes to pick up passengers.
The next stop was more than half an hour away. The road started by winding through field and prairie but quickly began to turn and twist along the edge of a deep canyon. Tight curves that scared me stiff. Finally we reached an oasis: Gréoux-les-Bains.
I stumbled off the bus, the way I would roll off a roller coaster a few years later at the carnival. My feet felt like they were walking on cotton, and my eyes tried to look everywhere at once. Barely time to make it to the ditch and throw up my meagre meal. I breathed through burning, stinging nostrils that actively participated in my internal cleansing ritual.
Finally, the ground grew firmer, the landscape more solid, each thing in its place – the bus, the people, the buildings. Even the battalion of ants besieging what was left of my lunch. Ah, the happiness of seeing things as they are! My stomach declared itself open for business again – and declared it loudly. But it would have to wait until Aix-en-Provence.
The bus pulled away with three or four more passengers. The next stop was Vinon.
Now the road was almost straight, following the left bank of the Durance River. The bus purred and I fell asleep to the sound.
Quarter to six: Aix-en-Provence, the city of a hundred fountains. A twenty-minute break on the shaded terrace of a bar on the Cours Sextius. In the plane trees, bunches of sparrows chirped. A toilet stop, a sandwich and lemonade.
Then came the long road down to Marseille, which we’d reach around seven in the evening, after travelling through Luynes, Les Trois Pigeons, La Mounine and La Malle. The road crossed open country as the sun deserted the sky. Soon, the road’s straight line met its first houses: La Viste, in Marseille’s shadow.
A Pinch of Time Page 9