A Pinch of Time

by Claude Tatilon

  Sharp as can be, Henriette found the only possible remedy.

  “Paul, the summer is terribly hot, and in the evening our terrace is cool enough. Invite your friends over to enjoy it!”

  “But, Rose…”

  “Don’t be silly! This is your home, too. Come whenever you like, however many you may be. Every evening, if you wish.”

  A few days after my father’s return, her shame swallowed, armed with unsteady courage, my mother came to see the man who was still her husband.

  I remember they stayed at the far end of the terrace for a very long time, leaning on the railing. She must have told him, with great pain in her voice and tears streaming down her cheeks, that her decision was final. Perhaps she explained that, if she’d yielded to another man, it was only because she was in a time of complete distress, and she’d needed to survive her sadness. She must have encouraged him to take time to heal, to make an effort to pull himself together and maybe even to follow her example. Before she left, I saw her kiss him tenderly on the cheek. He lingered for a long while out on the terrace, alone.

  How could I know what those two people, who had loved each other dearly and perhaps still did, felt at the time? For whom was the ordeal most difficult? For my mother, who had to exact the unspeakable cruelty of her choice? For my father, who had to accept an implacable decision he could not change?

  But in the end, when you return to life like Lazarus, and when you’re not even forty… Since he had very few tears left and didn’t want to ruin what life he had miraculously held onto, he took the chance he had and accepted the divorce without contesting it. Another woman, young and beautiful, would soon come into his life. Under the ashes of his misery, new happiness was brewing, waiting for him to seize it. After a cataclysm shatters your world, destroys your health, and reduces your home to ashes, you either give up on life or cling to it. Once more, my father stood tall – and took this new woman with open arms. He offered her his heart, and she did not refuse it. From then on, it would be another story, with its own joys and sorrows.

  As for my own feelings, they were in a shambles… On one hand, a father I thought lost forever, who belonged to a past I was barely aware of, and in whose face I could not recognize the shining young sailor from the picture… On the other, Uncle Roger, a blessing from Heaven, source of happiness and contentment – he had reassured us, protected us, amused us and, best of all, healed my mother – and for all those reasons I saw him as one of the most wonderful people in my small world.

  TWENTY-ONE

  During my father’s brief stay on Rue Chaix (he would live there from mid-June to the end of 1945), his comrades from the Resistance, who had happily accepted Henriette’s invitation, would show up two or three times a week to enjoy the terrace and its cool air. There would always be five or six of them appearing in the straightening shadows of the evening, with Uncle Eugène often joining them later.

  With the exception of Caraco, all of them – François, Joseph, Little Pierre, Raymond, Alexandre and Alfred – had, like my father, belonged to Doctor Gaston C.’s network. When I say all of them, I mean those who survived: those six and a few others, including Maguy Ducerf, Ange Casta, Georges Durand, and the doctor. Eleven survivors out of thirty-one.

  Salutary moments of relaxation, of a few drinks and freedom as, together again, they slowly rose from their own ashes with the sumptuous nightly tableau of the port and the harbour slipping into darkness before them. They would meet to purge their minds of the painful memories that tortured them, exiling those memories with cathartic chatter that, strangely enough, would always be filled with humour.

  They would break the bonds of their obsessive memories, and from their lips poured tales that transfixed me – the work Kommandos where comrades died of exhaustion under the blows of sadistic guards and bloodthirsty dogs, the roll calls in freezing German weather wearing only the lightest of clothes, the endless journeys in packed cattle cars, where the dead bodies of fallen comrades would be pushed into a corner to serve as a barrier to the piss and shit of the living… Sometimes, heroic stories would make me shudder, yet fill me with enthusiasm: the story of Caraco’s cap, for example, or other feats they’d accomplished before their arrest. Like the story of François, he who was known as Le Grava (The Pockmarked).

  Le Grava was the hottest of the hotheads in the network, and you can imagine that he wasn’t afraid of anything. To say he feared nothing or no one would be putting it mildly. He’d always be charged with the most dangerous jobs and, once accomplished, he’d come back, salute and ask for more. He was something else, all right: unfailing courage, unbreakable determination. Before putting a bomb under a car, a knife through a heart, or even a bullet in someone’s head, he first rehearsed everything, methodically, in his head. By the time he was ready for action, there was no hesitation or doubt; the execution of the act was a mere formality. And when someone would congratulate him for his courage and audacity, he answered with a modest shrug, quoting Corneille: “To conquer without danger is to triumph without glory!” He might not have been the best student, but he had learned that line by heart.

  In early 1943, the Wehrmacht, which had occupied the South of France since the November 11, 1942, hardened their line under the direction of the ubiquitous Gestapo. François Le Grava was given the mission to eliminate the SS colonel responsible for the execution of several Resistance fighters, shot in the courtyard of the Saint-Nicolas fort in Marseille. “I’m going skin him quick, the bastard!” The colonel had his quarters in a posh building on the Cours Pierre-Puget, occupying the three floors with his bodyguards, maids and servants – fifteen people in all. Le Grava quickly gathered enough information for his dangerous mission. Our man slipped into the building early one morning with the help of a coal delivery man. He hid in the basement, behind a boiler and a pile of coal. The cubbyhole was small and dark, and he had to stay there until nightfall, crouched in his hideout, careful and attentive to every sound: distant voices, a shouted order, a door slamming, soldiers climbing up and down the stairs… A soldier in darkness, he waited patiently for his moment, refusing to think too much. There was no point in it: he knew how, with a short, skilful movement, to slice through the carotid or slip a blade under the diaphragm to reach the heart or a major artery. He was gifted in the matter.

  After several long hours, all sounds abated. Le Grava could finally stretch his sore limbs and get his strength back with some limbering exercises. A confident professional, he was in no hurry. He waited another half-hour – his indispensable margin of security.

  He knew exactly where on the second floor the colonel was sleeping. He also knew that the room next door was bristling with armed guards. But he wasn’t worried.

  No sound could be heard. He emerged from his hiding place and climbed the stairs, each floor bathed in the soft glow from a skylight. He climbed patiently, making sure no floorboards creaked; a cat couldn’t have been quieter. He reached the colonel’s door, tried to open it – locked! He took out a master key, jigged the lock a little, and it yielded without a sound. Phew! No inside lock. The door opened onto complete darkness. He entered and closed the door behind him, walked a few steps and stopped… His eyes quickly grew used to the darkness, and now he made out a tiny night light floating in a glass bulb, sitting on a piece of furniture – the colonel’s bedside table. He moved forward. On the table, an automatic pistol. He pocketed it and took out his tool: a small Corsican vendetta whose blade was as sharp as a razor. The night light’s flickering flame glinted off its tip. A knife held with a firm hand, the hand of a throat-slitter and a strangler – war, like noblesse, obliges. Next to him, peacefully sleeping, the colonel savoured his last night on this earth. An excellent idea, this night light: the filth will be the spectator of his own demise… It’s done often enough in the Gestapo!

  At the bedside of the condemned, Le Grava woke him by pushing his hand over his mouth and his blade before his eyes. Horrified, supplicating eyes, as wide as sauce
rs. With a quick twist of his wrist, Le Grava slit his throat, with a smile as big as the open wound. A good hand, precise, quick, strong: it never betrayed him. A pious hand, too, from time to time: with a sign of the cross, it absolved the man it just dispatched to another world, offering with that devout gesture an Ausweis for a trip without return. “Always respect the death of another man, whoever he might be!” That was the pious François’s motto.

  The network’s last mission, two days before the May 25, 1943, arrests, was entrusted to Raymond, who had volunteered to eliminate the militiaman responsible for Armand’s arrest – the first among many who’d soon be in the hands of the enemy, taken on the 17th as he was leaving his office. Mercier was the name of the militiaman, a Frenchman to boot!

  Insults, humiliation, fists to the face and kicks to the belly: then covered in his own blood, the poor comrade was thrown into the Militia’s vehicle.

  Raymond took up position near the restaurant, on Rue Beauvau, where Mercier often ate his midday meal. The traitor arrived, followed by two henchmen. They walked past him without noticing Raymond, whose nose was stuck in the newspaper he was holding. His bike stood against the wall.

  That was Raymond, whom my father said had a heart “big like this,” with a generous expanse of his hands. That was true enough. He never backed down, never abandoned, never gave up, even under punishment and threats.

  The wait was endless. Then the three men came out. They passed right in front of Raymond without looking at him. He leaped up and stuck a knife in Mercier’s side. The traitor stopped in his tracks and fell to his knees. Raymond jumped on his bike and turned the corner quickly enough to avoid the bullets.

  A passerby who was, by chance, on the other side of the street (it was Little Pierre waiting for the results) informed him that same night of his mission’s success.

  I also heard on my grandmother’s terrace, with the moonlight shining down, another expert in expedited solutions tell a few stories of his own: Joseph the Goï – the same one who had escaped the arrests at the doctor’s headquarters.

  All alone, but keeping in mind his leader’s instructions, he continued for a time with direct and delaying action before offering his services to a cell in the Var region. “It’s our duty to keep the Occupation army in a constant state of insecurity, to wage a war of attrition, to push it to react violently and alienate the population – a population of indifferent and passive citizens that will have to wake up at some point, for Christ’s sake! Can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, boys.”

  A fisherman by trade, Jo decided one day to take down a battery situated in one of the blockhouses built on the Corniche promenade. He calmly rowed his way up to a blockhouse, no problem, and then it was easy enough just to toss in a grenade and – boom! Right in the middle of the gunners who’d neglected to wave as he passed. “You have to admit, they deserved a lesson in manners!” he joked. His one regret? He wasn’t able to use the same trick twice. After his exploit, the gunners in the coastal batteries welcomed any approaching craft with a salvo of gunfire. “Just plain impolite, don’t you think?”

  Another time, he’d blown up a German vedette boat. He was placing his lines near the Planier lighthouse when the vedette slowly came about. On board, three men wearing the Kriegsmarine’s white uniform, with that strange little black hat and its slightly feminine ribbons. At least these ones were polite, even courteous. They addressed him in a friendly manner, and he vaguely understood they were asking if the fish were biting. Smiling, he bent down into his boat, as if looking for a nice catch to show off… Instead, he came back with a live grenade. The detonation almost sent him to the bottom with his victims. “Without a doubt, the hardest thing I’d done – those three affable faces, looking at me without suspicion… They often haunt my dreams, I’ll tell you…”

  Needs must when the devil drives… But what horror, what stupidity!

  And so, on the terrace, I would shudder with fear late into the night when the conversation would turn to these matters. I would sit still and drink in every word they spoke until – always much too early – Grandma would come outside, wearing a smile but with a tone that left me no options. “Dominique, it’s time to go to bed. Say goodnight to your Dad and these gentlemen.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Maguy, Ange, Georges, and the Doctor never came to the evenings on Rue Chaix. Back from the camps, the first three went home: Maguy to Aix-en-Provence, Georges to Sainte-Tulle, near Manosque, and Ange to Bonifacio. I never met Georges, who killed himself shortly after his return, and I met Maguy and Ange the day of Raymond’s funeral.

  In the early fifties, my father introduced me to the doctor and his wife during one of the frequent visits he made to their house on the Cours Devilliers, where their network had been broken up in 1943 and where the doctor still had his practice. I was a student at the Lycée Thiers at the time, only ten minutes away. I would soon come to know the place very well, since the couple, who had no family of their own and was rather withdrawn from the world, expressed the desire to see me again. They were so kind to me – they welcomed me as if I were a nephew – that my visits soon became weekly.

  In the living room where we would sit, in plain sight on a console table, I noticed the picture of a young man with a broad smile: their only son Christian, who died in a camp in the last few weeks of the war. He’d also been a member of his father’s network. The ultimate sacrifice for his country at twenty-three years old. In front of the picture, under a glass pane that also held a tri-coloured ribbon in the upper left corner, a hand-written page read:

  March 14, 1945, do you remember? We were evacuated from Vaihingen. Despite our protests, we weren’t allowed in the same car. Unknown destination. Two days later, Dachau. I rushed to your car. You were among the dead they were throwing onto the platform. They beat me, set a dog on me, they stopped me from getting near you, from taking you in my arms. But since that day, you haven’t left me, and I haven’t left you.

  Papa

  On the far side of the living room was a bookcase, a large piece of furniture with panes of glass. Half the space was reserved for scientific works and the other half for literary ones.

  The first thing I noticed about the room was its particular odour, which I can still smell today, but that I couldn’t describe except to say it was slightly sweet. The odour probably emanated from the books, since it always seemed more present when we opened the bookcase doors.

  I spent long hours in that room, choosing the books I’d borrow for the week. Sometimes, when his schedule permitted, the doctor would come and see me between two patients to guide me in my choice or gather my impressions of the most recently read work. He especially enjoyed Pierre Loti and Anatole France, the latter for his anticlerical views and social ideas – two authors who were never mentioned in school. He recommended that I begin my education with The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard. He said nothing more. I was surprised to find not even a trace of a crime plot, yet I was certainly not disappointed. This subtle story, “written in the shadow of other books,” would reveal itself to be an excellent introduction. I soon devoured an entire shelf full of Anatole France’s best titles and a few of Pierre Loti’s exotic travel books that took me from the Basque country to Bretagne and Iceland, via Greece, Turkey and Japan. That first year, Madame C. suggested that I read Jean Giono’s Pan Trilogy – Hill of Destiny, Lovers Are Never Losers, and Harvest, which brought me straight back to the heart of my dear Provence and reminded me – with great melancholy – of the Moustiers of my childhood, the setting of my first emotions.

  In early 1953, a few days after my sixteenth birthday, the doctor’s wife invited me for a flute of champagne. There would be a guest, I was told, a long-standing friend they wanted me to meet.

  I arrived on time on a Sunday afternoon and was welcomed into the living room. Their guest, a man in his sixties with a pleasant face and mischievous eyes, put down his pipe and offered me his hand. “I hear, young man, that you’re inte
rested in literature…” It was Jean Giono, in the flesh. Madame C. brought out a cake she’d prepared for the occasion, the doctor opened a bottle of champagne and the discussion quickly warmed. At first I was shy, but I quickly felt at ease with this charming trio. I stopped thinking I was taking an exam or giving an oral presentation and began to respond spontaneously to the questions asked, even revealing my own doubts and questions. An unforgettable lesson about the authenticity of reading and the true pleasure I could take from it. I won’t soon forget that afternoon.

  Giono, so true to himself, whose pacifist writings in the thirties offended the warlike France of 1939 and even more so the revanchist France and the numerous overnight Resistance fighters of 1944 – his pen would twice earn him a stay in jail. But the sincerity and humanity of the writer (whose complete pacifism was no comfort, far from it) was appreciated by the dear doctor, who never mistook his childhood friend for Brasillach, Drieu la Rochelle, or any of their consorts, those abhorrent and misguided authors.

  Dany, my former schoolmate whom I’d seen only once or twice over the years and saw again in Moustiers in April of 1953, was also impressed.

  “You saw Jean Giono?”

  “As clearly as I see you! We even had a long conversation.”

  I knew how to take advantage of the situation. I spoke at length and with great authority of the Pan Trilogy. I had devoured those novels with such an appetite!

  How the young woman had filled out the promises of the girl; she had turned into a very pretty thing indeed! Our relationship developed rather quickly. Our year-and-a-day age difference didn’t matter any more. What she had acquired in chest size, I had in height, and I was now a good head taller than she. She accepted the idea of a little moonlit walk to the edge of the village; it was already quite warm in Provence at the end of April. “But I need to be home before midnight.”