A Pinch of Time

by Claude Tatilon

  Just as we began descending a steep slope, the sun reappeared, a large red balloon floating in the clear sky. It was almost touching the horizon. Below us, Marseille tumbled into the sea. We were overlooking everything: the layers of houses, the port, and even the steeple of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, perched on its hill. Marseille, a boat of a city, always pushing against its moorings and heading toward open water, ready to lift anchor and sail past the islands of Frioul and Château d’If, a few cable-lengths away.

  Our bus finally stopped on the square in front of the Stock Exchange, right by the Canebière and the Old Port. The place brought back no memories; without Grandma Rose at my side, I would have surely felt lost. In a hurry to get home, she took me by the arm and dragged me towards a large bar, the Brasserie des Templiers, its terrace completely packed. “Let’s take the side street, on the right.” And just like that, we were facing the postcard view of ancient Lacydon. I started to remember, vaguely… Yes, of course! On the hill, the Holy Mother was still there.

  In Moustiers, I’d hear Gérard exclaim, “Oh, Holy Mother of Marseille!” My mother and Roger, even if he was a native of Toulon, said the same thing, as did more than a few inhabitants of Moustiers. Oh, Holy Mother – even Jésus had picked that one up.

  What a racket, what an uproar! People singing, shouting, calling to one another, arguing.

  Never in Moustiers had my eardrums suffered such aggression. Except when Roger would shoot off his gun next to me. And these smells of salt, iodine, pitch, and fish: Marseille had its own odour, different from the scrublands of the lower Alps. A miéterrane scent (a beautiful Provençal adjective brought into French by the writer Suarès). Through all my senses, I was rediscovering the city of my birth.

  We crossed the wide street in front of us that Grandma called Rue de la République, and we found ourselves in front of another bistro, this one even more packed than the first, with tables jostling for room with the passersby on the sidewalk.

  Ten years later, the Samaritaine (I didn’t know the name at the time), from which your eyes can wander all the way from the Quai des Belges right up to the wonderful Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, would become one of my preferred spots. I would often stop by, accompanied by Suzon, Martine, Maryse, Éliane, or Mimi, and drink everyone’s favourite. “Garçon! Two rum-pineapples.” A dose of pineapple syrup, a shot of rum, lots of water and ice. The same colour as Ricard, but with a far superior taste – that of adolescence.

  We quickened our pace and made our way towards the Quai des Belges. Just as we were crossing a street, an American Jeep zipped past at top speed only an inch from us. Grandma Rose, never one to mince words – she was a fishmonger, after all – yelled, “Hey, Blackie! You liberate us yesterday and run over us today?”

  At the head of the quay, fishermen were mending their nets, using both bare hands and feet.

  In the middle of it, the impressive grey silhouette of a US Navy ship hid the waters behind it. “Grandma, it’s swarming with people here!” There were military men everywhere, especially Americans speaking a strange tongue. GIs wearing khaki, sailors in navy blue and funny white hats. I wanted to linger in front of the warship, but Grandma was pulling me by the arm. “Come on! The tram is already at the stop!”

  At the edge of the quay, a Senegalese wearing a boubou, squatting on his heels, tried to talk me into buying a small wooden giraffe. “My boy, my boy, come here, very cheap!” Masks, ivory, wooden sculptures, musical instruments thrown one on top of the other on a small blanket. Grandma Rose pulled me even harder, but she did promise, “You can come back with Henriette tomorrow.” Did my aunt keep the promise her mother made? I can’t remember.

  Twenty metres away, the tram was ringing its bell; we broke into a run. This time, it was my turn to pull on Grandma’s hand. “Shake a leg, lady, it’s all aboard now!” His hat glued to his head, the motorman clapped his hands and enjoined us to hurry. “Up you go, up you go. Big step up! Good boy!”

  The tram dropped us at the corner of Rue Endoume and Boulevard de la Corderie. Another ten-minute trot: Place Joseph-Étienne, the steep slope of the Rue des Lices and then we’re there – Rue Chaix.

  Back in her own territory, Grandma Rose took the bit between her teeth and began galloping like a horse that smells its stable.

  “Come on, Nico, just a bit further. Do you want me to take your bag?”

  “No, Grandma, I can do it myself!”

  At the bottom of the stairs, a creaking noise, and we looked up: a neighbour was hanging her wash out the window. The sky was a faded blue.

  “Good evening, Rose. Good evening, gàrri.”

  “Good evening, Madame Rossi.”

  “How are you, Anna? We just got in from Moustiers.”

  And so on and so forth. As if we were returning from great travels. But the two minutes the conversation gave me to catch my breath at the foot of the stairs were welcome.

  On the side of the hill topped by Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, Rue Chaix (the inhabitants of the neighbourhood had called it ru-ché since time immemorial) ran about four hundred metres and had some sixty doors. It began at Rue des Lices and ended at Rue Vauvenargues, after describing a ninety-degree angle. Just before the elbow, about three-quarters of the way down the street, from number 26 to number 38, the street sloped steeply and boasted an abrupt set of steps, about one hundred in all. Grandma Rose and Henriette’s house stood at number 36; ours, number 38, right at the top of the staircase. Eugène and Virginie, Émile and Marie, and my four cousins lived at 42 and 42 bis, just past the steps, two small attached houses with a terrace and a little yard.

  The staircase, though narrow, was split in two by a steel banister, on which the neighbourhood kids would wear out the seats of their pants. Gérard and I were no exception.

  Come summertime, by nine o’clock, the steps would be full of neighbours sitting on the cool stone stairs. Every evening, assembled on the step closest to their respective doors, some twenty people would take the air and exchange the local gossip. A real working-class neighbourhood, a village within the city.

  In front of number 36 was a landing of some twelve square metres before the last flight of steps. On it, two more doors: number 34 and in front, on the left side if you were going up, number 29, where a Spanish couple lived. Mr. and Mrs. Martinez had come to live in Marseille a few months after Francisco Franco y Bahamonde Salgado Prado entered Madrid on April 1, 1939. “Este primero de Abril, we decide we don’t like the taste of the fish anymore,” they used to say. I could understand their Iberian jabber better than most, though I never studied Castilian Spanish. And I can still belt out “la niña, la niña-del fuego” just like Señora Martinez – half-Andalusian, half-illusion, Jacques Brel would have said – who, without warning, would launch into song at irregular intervals during the day. I must have learned Spanish very young without even trying, thanks to Jesús Fernandez.

  So many memories on that landing and those steps… I did not actually experience the one I remember with the most clarity: my grandmother told me about it once we arrived at her door, the very evening I left Moustiers.

  Right in front of us, a huge hole, a good metre in circumference and at least thirty centimetres deep. Just beneath Aunt Henriette’s bedroom window, in front of the cellar window. The cement still torn apart a good year later.

  “And it took them three weeks to come and pick up the darn shell. You can imagine how afraid we were, sleeping right next to it…”

  “What was the shell like, Grandma?”

  “Like a shell! Lying on its side, black and pointed...”

  “Was it big?”

  “Big? Like a skipjack: at least a hundred kilos! But, thank God, it fell on its stomach.”

  This heavy artillery shell had landed on August 27, 1944, during the fight for the liberation of Marseille, while in Rose’s cellar dug into the rock, a good fifteen neighbours and family members were packed like sardines. “Fortunately, it didn’t blow. Or else, peuchère… The Holy Mother of M
arseille saved us!”

  And that was where, in that charmed place in Marseille, in the shadow of our merciful Protector, my father would recover the family that really wasn’t his any more. But all the same, they would welcome him with open arms and make him feel as though he had always been one of them. And that was also where my father and I would be reunited.

  TWENTY

  Tuesday, June 12th. My father was supposed to arrive at the Saint-Charles station on one of the evening trains, but he hadn’t been able to tell Uncle Eugène which one. At the time, rail transport was chaotic. The country was awakening and everyone wanted to go somewhere else, all at the same time. All the more so in what had been the Free Zone, where so many had come to take refuge in November of 1942, hoping to get to England or America or simply to avoid Nazi persecution. Numerous deportees were going home, of course, back to happy situations or nasty surprises. Uncle Émile, who managed to obtain a few litres of gas on the black market for his Citroën, took it upon himself to transport the welcoming committee made up of two brothers-in-law, Rose and me, of course. (I was wondering with some anxiety whether Uncle Émile would be able to drive the car with his eye in the shape it was in – black around it, red inside, almost closed!)

  On the station platform, my grandmother kept tidying my hair, straightening my shirt, and giving me clear instructions: “Don’t forget to go forward and kiss him. And most of all, don’t look surprised, even if you find him very thin…” Around us, the noise was staggering; the Aurelle, Forbin, and Audéoud barracks, as well as the Saint-Jean and Saint-Nicolas forts, had to open their doors for the hundreds of soldiers on leave who were arriving. Every exotic element of the French army seemed to be there on the platform: the zouaves with their curious baggy pants, Senegalese infantrymen with red chéchias on their black heads, Algerian units from the 7th RTA who had liberated Marseille, spahis from the great deserts draped in their capes, legionnaires with their white kepis… And sailors too, their berets topped with red pompons like the one in my father’s picture, and white gaiters. A real Babel! A torrent of words poured forth on that platform, a thousand languages pattering, a thousand dialects and idioms meeting… But also, pardi, the sunlit tongue of the Midi – though it had difficulty being heard. A few steps away was a mischievous little girl; we communicated through signs and faces.

  The first train arrived from Paris at 6:40 p.m. As it pulled up, the acrid odour of coal wafted through the station. Uncle Émile sat me on his shoulders (“But what’s wrong with his eye, boudiou?”) and I was the lookout: a lost cause, though, for my father wasn’t on the train. Most of the passengers were deportees, that was easy to see: their faces were emaciated, their clothes much too big for their frail bodies. A few of them had kept their camp uniforms, the horrible striped outfit that they wore with a measure of pride. How I hoped Dad wouldn’t be dressed like that! Cries, tears, hugs. All the confusion made the show slightly surreal.

  I came down from my perch. Rose took my hand and gripped it tightly, my two uncles framing me. The little girl had disappeared.

  The next train got in a good hour later, at 7:53 on the station’s huge clock. Even before we could see it, a thundering noise announced its imminent arrival. An enormous plume of white smoke arose at the end of the platform; then, blurred by jets of vapour, the black locomotive appeared, slowly approaching. Once again, the acrid odour of coal. The noise of the crowd was so intense it made the train seem silent until it rolled to a stop with an endless squeal of brakes.

  Perched on Uncle Émile’s shoulders once more, I scanned the new arrivals in vain. My father spotted us first; we didn’t notice him until he was a stone’s throw away. For me, it was a terrible shock – he was so thin, so broken. The few seconds I needed to slip down to the ground was enough to hide my panic. He took me in his arms. “Do you remember me? You’ve changed, you know!” Not as much as him! Close up, his skin was even more wrinkled than Grandma’s, and he seemed much older than his brothers-in-law, who were actually older than he was. At least he wasn’t wearing that awful prisoner’s garb. He had on a dark vest, rather becoming too, and a white shirt. A wide smile lit up his face. Immediately, I remembered that smile – it was the same as the one in the pictures. I felt all that in confused fashion: the image came from far away, from the furthest reaches of my childhood, like the faint light of a distant star…

  Our embrace went on forever, with Eugène repeating, over and over, “Oh, brother! Oh, brother!” The expression has since become legendary in our family. My father interrupted them to ask about his wife’s absence, which deflated our enthusiasm like a badly cooked soufflé. “Don’t worry, Paul, she’s well. She just sprained her ankle the day before yesterday,” his mother-in-law lied. “Ah…” And in that extended “Ah,” there was much to hear: the ‘b’ in bizarre, the ‘c’ in consternation, the ‘d’ in disappointment… all the way to the ‘s’ in shit – a noble exclamation, a great consoler of human misery.

  We made our way through the crowd. I insisted on being the one to carry our phantom father’s luggage, and I held onto it proudly all the way to the car. It was very light: a tiny suitcase with only a few personal things.

  A cardboard suitcase that, as he was leaving Dachau, he later told us, he had taken from one of those heaps of confiscated objects, since seen in more than one press photo – tragic monuments of concentration-camp art erected to memorialize the horror and savagery. In separate sculptures raised high, here were watches, there glasses or dentures, tufts of hair, handbags, shoes, belts, suitcases… Inside his, I would find clothes, papers, medication, perfume and a few knickknacks (including my first miniature Eiffel Tower) bought in Paris for a few pennies.

  By the time we reached the Old Port, my father had tried several times to revive the conversation about my mother. But mum’s the word! We preferred to let him rave on about the waterfront and on his right, the beautiful Grand Siècle city hall, so rich in memories for him, and on his left, Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde, perched on its hill, and the Saint-Victor abbey, leaning against the ramparts of Fort Saint-Nicolas – our neighbourhood. And then, with the tact and aplomb that she used to master difficult situations, Rose told him “what had changed.” Dad’s dry eyes found a way to secrete imperceptible tears that glinted with fleeting light. “Oh, I see…” And nothing more. Not a word. We respected his silence all the way to our destination, on Rue Chaix.

  The apartment where I lived with my parents before the great family shake-up, at number 38 on that street, was right above the fully detached house at number 36, where Rose and Henriette lived. Our two windows gave onto their terrace, with a view all the way down to the port, the islands and the great sea beyond it. Home at last, my father sat down at one of the windows and looked out, like a sailor at his post. “But you’ll come and have every meal with us,” his mother-in-law added with that peremptory tone that she’d always match with surprising tenderness. Henriette echoed her mother’s decision. “You’ll always be welcome here, Paul. And your son will continue sleeping with us, in the third room.” Good, wonderful Henriette, single her entire life, but a mother to all her nephews. My father, his heart adrift, quickly accepted this arrangement.

  The day following his return, the whole family, with the notable exception of the three still in Moustiers, gathered together around a bowl of pistou on Rose and Henriette’s veranda, which had lost all its windows during the battle to free the city in August 1944. Fit for a king, that pistou was full of nearly unobtainable ingredients – with a distinct aftertaste of overflowing emotion. It had been prepared, of course, by Aunt Virginie, under Eugène’s attentive eyes, and was accompanied by two or three old bottles that he’d pulled from behind his woodpile. Disoriented and hurt, my father paid an exorbitant price for his first soup as a free man: a price worthy of Shylock, though he didn’t have even a gram of flesh to pay with.

  And my mother who was in such confusion a hundred kilometres away… And Gérard and Aunt Marie who must have been wondering too�
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  The meal lasted a good three hours. I remember that the accompanying conversation was often awkward, and lapsed into heavy silence more than once. But Eugène’s wine was a good enough fuel. My father had been dry for a long time, and he needed only a glass to abandon his silence. He told several stories, and one has stuck with me since. Liberated from Dachau, he arrived at the Lutetia with a few other deportees, all in camp garb. They were led toward one of the hotel’s grand salons, from which they could hear chamber music playing. As they entered the room, the musicians immediately stopped playing, stood up, saluted them, then began a loud rendition of the Marseillaise. My father confessed that his eyes had filled with tears.

  Then he asked Uncle Émile what was behind the superb black eye he was sporting (I hadn’t dared ask him). He admitted he’d fought with one of his harbour firefighter colleagues. When he announced that his brother-in-law was returning, the subtle fellow retorted that it couldn’t have been that hard in the camps if my father had been able to survive!

  Overall, the prisoners returning from Germany didn’t receive a very warm welcome – people had gotten used to their absence. Of the four categories of prisoners, the volunteer workers and those of the “Relève” [8] got the worst reception – mostly contempt and hostility. The STO workers were not appreciated on their return either; everyone had a score to settle after the war, and people wondered why the STO guys couldn’t have avoided service. Well, a lot of them did! Prisoners of war, by far the greatest number (almost a million men), did receive some consideration. But let’s admit they hadn’t made their country proud during the “Phoney War”! Though people were ready to commiserate with the skeletal deportees, they were rarely eager to listen to the litany of horrors they’d suffered – after all, in the homeland, everyone had paid. And then again, basta! It was time to forget the whole thing… Besides, how could they have put their suffering into words? And how could they have tolerated the shameless incredulity that often greeted them? Might as well keep quiet, swallow the bitter pill and silently suffer the terrible devastation within.