A Pinch of Time

by Claude Tatilon

  Were I to believe her, she was most impressed by the change in the size of my shoulders.

  “I do a lot of sports at school – gymnastics, the high jump, running, handball.”

  “I mostly dance.”

  “I can see that by the shape of your legs.”

  “You think they’re too big?”

  “Not at all. They’re muscular and wonderfully shaped. Your calves are… exquisite. As for your thighs, I can’t tell yet.”

  Just like that, I made my request. And since we were nonchalantly lying in the grass, it was instantly satisfied.

  Our youthful enthusiasm quickly exhausted us, and I remember how hard it was not to fall asleep with her. Without the village clock tower… But twelve tolls of the bell are usually enough to wake the dead. In the end, Dany’s lateness went unnoticed. Our short night would never be repeated, and I would only have an encore in my memories.

  In July, the proud young woman would return to Moustiers with a diploma, having scored high on all her exams. I was already in the village, having insisted on spending the first few weeks of my vacation there. Émile and Marie were always happy to welcome their nephews. “The rooms upstairs are there for a reason.”

  As soon as I got her alone souto li pin, I complimented, perhaps with too much enthusiasm, the girl I called, with great naiveté, “my Dany.” But, quickly enough, I had to come to terms with the disagreeable facts: her heart was no longer in it and her mind, no doubt occupied with more important ventures than me, forbade her body to waste energy on a now-futile endeavour. And so life goes.

  This misadventure remained a sore spot for me, but at least it allowed me to write a liberating poem that, once finished, I decided not to share with my innocent torturer. Since then, nostalgically, I’ve kept it for my eyes only.

  Our love first bloomed in early summer

  And our hearts lost their cold pallor

  As we lay under the budding moon,

  And for each other sang and swooned.

  Thy skin is white like mother’s milk

  And from your fountainhead I wish to drink

  So I lay my mouth on yours, but my heart doest sink

  Knowing you’ll refuse me your silk

  Oh, why doest the buds of May bloom?

  For into leaves they’ll turn soon

  And then they fall in winter’s shadow

  And will be left in the dead meadow

  Where we used to sit and talk of love

  Before your heart – fickle dove –

  Left it for another spring

  And now I must tend my broken wings.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Evening come, as day turned into night, we often cried on the terrace – tears of laughter, more often than not. The stories weren’t all funny, far from it, but they very rarely finished on a sad note. The funniest one was Little Pierre’s.

  In 1943, the year of his arrest, Little Pierre was twenty-three years old and engaged – well, not exactly, but almost. In his mind, in any case, he was married, and also in the imagination of his sweetheart, Mathilde de Saint-Onge, whom he’d met in October of the previous year, at the start of the new semester at the Faculty of Letters in Aix-en-Provence. By Easter, probably by Palm Sunday, they were already speaking of marriage. She loves him, of course she loves him. With every fibre of her little heart. Does it not beat with fervour every time she sees him? Me too, my love, I could never live without you. Why hesitate, let’s get married – next year, next month! Spirits run high under the burning Provençal sun.

  But to make those words a reality… The fact was that Mathilde’s parents hadn’t exactly warmed to Pierre on his first visit to the family home. They lived in a posh house on the heights above Marseille, in Roucas-Blanc, from which one could gaze at the endless sea. And since, on the second visit, they had been no more enthusiastic – smiles are not always signs of cordiality – Pierre understandably decided that there would be no third meeting in the near future.

  As for the Saint-Onge family, they were ship chandlers, from one generation to the next, since the nineteenth century. Following the well-known snowball principle, Mathilde’s father, the most recent of the line, didn’t even know how rich he was. It was very clear to Pierre’s eyes since, after all, he did use them for seeing, that the tragic situation in France under the heel of the German boot had not affected the well-to-do family’s sumptuous circumstances. (As proof, a small Pissaro and two large Degas paintings hung on the wall of their living room – bought at a steal, the sanctimonious Mathilde explained, from their neighbours, two nice Jews who’d suddenly deserted Marseille without leaving so much as an address…)

  “The second time I went to their home, it was for some kind of function. I had no desire to go, but Mathilde insisted. So I put on whatever looked best in my closet – meaning the cheap suit I’d bought a month earlier for my thesis defence (I’d just finished my master’s on Pirandello’s theatre) – and I ignored my bitterness to please my dear Mathilde. I never change, eh? I get to the place all prettied up and as soon as I walk through the door, I feel like an idiot: I’m certainly not dressed for the occasion. Mathilde’s look made that clear enough… Just imagine: among the guests there were several Kraut officers, not to mention some of the region’s Pétainiste debris!”

  Pierre’s father, Monsieur Scotto, was unfortunately not related to Vincent Scotto, the creator of the Marseille operetta and the author of several hundred songs, including some very famous ones, like La Petite Tonkinoise and J’ai deux amours. As for Marcel Scotto, he was a simple mason – and a labourer to boot, not a boss. Besides, since those fateful visits, Pierre, who was no fool, was starting to have serious doubts about the possibility of marriage to a girl whom, as a sensible boy, he no longer saw in the same light. Hadn’t he observed that Mathilde’s opposition to her parents was no longer as strong? That she was becoming less spontaneous with him, that she looked at him differently? No doubt it’s difficult to disagree with your mother and father, especially when they’re indecently rich. No easier than to throw yourself, without a penny, into a marriage with a rich heiress whose intentions seem to be faltering.

  The forced separation of the spring of 1943 had at least one advantage: Pierre’s passion cooled and he began to open his eyes. The whole thing was quite a banal business, a vaudeville sketch, really, but hurtful all the same. He had all the time he needed in the camps, where unhappiness took on a whole new dimension, to mull over the experience and turn it to ridicule. The treatment was most effective and Pierre quickly came to the conclusion that Mathilde wasn’t for him.

  In the camps, occasions to laugh were so few and far between that there was no chance he’d let that one go! He started to tell his tragic love story more and more frequently, adding details here, removing others there, asking for his friends’ opinions and then their participation. The story slowly grew, and soon enough it had turned into a sketch they all enjoyed acting out, each interpreting a character in the story in their own way. The actual plot was rather thin and repetitive, so they took to concentrating on its details, blowing them out of proportion. Little Pierre was convincing as the lovelorn, broken-hearted lover; other times he played the young, frustrated fiancé starting to show signs of exasperation. Caraco was excellent as the father, Monsieur de Saint-Onge in the flesh. He was the oldest of the bunch, but also the only one able to speak convincingly of hunting dogs and the Poitou marshes where he’d run them, a place he had never set foot in. He also liked to play an SS colonel close to the family, and he brought his role to new heights by making a monocle with a bit of wire. His modest prop would let him quickly switch from Monsieur de Saint-Onge to Colonel Friedrich Krupp von Bohlen – “the magnate of the Ruhr steel mills,” he’d always add.

  All this to say that the show was well rehearsed by the time they staged it at 36 Rue Chaix. Little Pierre or somebody else (I’d often ask for it) would propose we play “The Pleasures of Love” (the title came from Grandma Rose, who’d oft
en hum the well-known tune), and then it would be all hands on deck! In a minute, the chairs were carried onto the veranda and set in a row, backs to the sea, for the lighting on the terrace where we usually met was woefully insufficient, even on full-moon nights. This set-up allowed us to create a space of some ten metres between the spectators and the veranda, which would become our stage, lit by the harsh white light of the wall lamp between the kitchen and the dining room’s French doors. Too bad about the mosquitoes that, no doubt having heard how it was done at Pearl Harbour, attacked us in waves like kamikazes, risking their lives. The slap of our hands against our arms and legs rarely coincided with the actors’ lines. But what can you do? The show must go on!

  The curtain rises. Little Pierre, back to the light, taps his pipe three times against the terrace rail. Silence falls. “As you can see, we are in the magnificent living room of the great Saint-Onge family [his hand sweeps across the expanse of the now-materialized living room], where we meet…” He puts a capital letter on each name he calls out and, one after the other, the characters rise from their chairs, step on stage, and bow to the audience in the orchestra pit. “And now, let us see what we shall see!” Pierre sits down, but he’ll be back soon enough to play his own role or maybe Mathilde’s – a few effeminate gestures to straighten a lock of hair or send a greeting to someone will be more than enough to convince the audience that he is the passionate lovebird about to fly away.

  My father played Firmin, the majordomo, since no one could open a bottle of champagne and serve the guests as stylishly as he could, his left hand behind his back. Caraco, wearing a new “Made in France” monocle, gave his performance more complexity by playing both his roles simultaneously, performing a rapid-fire dialogue between his two characters; he was just as quick as the great Chaplin himself. Once, in the middle of this hilarious scene, Rose had to run to the bathroom, and everyone understood why.

  From time to time, when Le Grava, who usually played the role, was absent, Little Pierre transformed himself into the excessively sinuous and voluptuous Madame de Saint-Onge, making desperate efforts to replicate her husband’s aristocratic poses, for he, unlike her, did not have common blood. Jo, whose limp had saved him from the camps, found a way to join the company by using his infirmity. He was Monsieur de la Grated Apple, a close neighbour who had had an unfortunate fall from his horse while riding somewhere in the Périgord region on his father-in-law’s estate. Sometimes, following his inspiration, he became Monsieur de la Melted Tower, another neighbour from Roucas who had tumbled, during a night of drinking, down the great staircase in his manor (a place that had even more windows than the Saint-Onge home). Yet the two roles were almost identical: essentially, he’d refuse Firmin’s champagne, exclaiming, “No! Bring me port wine, for Heaven’s sake, a twenty-year-old vintage and nothing else!” Then he would stuff his face full of canapés, making good use of the large mouth he’d inherited from his father, a distant cousin of Fernandel, and which would execute hilarious masticating effects. To top it all off, on certain nights, his chimerical canapés would take on a more-than-real appearance as a plate of Henriette’s fluffy, golden oreillettes!

  As for me, as soon as the show’s preparations would begin, I’d abandon the fig or the chocolate square I was nibbling on (in Marseille, it had a distinctively American flavour), run to grab Grandma, Auntie, and sometimes even Eugène in the neighbouring house if he wasn’t on the terrace already. He soon joined the company too, proposing a most unexpected character: a grotesque collaborator, a sort of Troll under the Bridge based on Moretti whom, of course, he played to perfection the very first time, with a Raimu accent. A true actor, that Eugène!

  The show would inevitably end with an overlaid scene that reminded the troupe of the cruel reality of the concentration camps, but that scene served only to turn it to ridicule and make it as funny as a spoonful of soup greedily gulped down, funny faces and all, his nose in the bowl – Raymond’s specialty.

  Raymond, a gangly fellow made of all bones and a profile like a bird of prey, had returned from the camps with his bronchus eroded by tuberculosis and had recently undergone an induced pneumothorax. Raymond was very nice to me, and I had great affection for him. I was always anxious when he joined the show. We had to be careful with him, since the slightest effort had him gasping for breath and he had difficulty finishing his sentences. The winks he bestowed to reassure me only pained me further; I couldn’t smile and act as if nothing was wrong.

  It was quite a spectacle, our outdoor theatre, with its natural backdrop of night sky studded with stars. And its treats, desserts, and tisanes were as warm as the bottom of our hearts. At times, the heavy blast of a steamship horn would travel all the way to our ears, through the dark and the distance.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “That I’m still breathing today is a real miracle. Without my friends around me, I’d have never made it through.”

  They would all say the same. After days and nights of watching death take their closest neighbours, after living for months and months among stiff corpses, smelling their pestilential odour, they knew, beyond all official statistics, that they were the true survivors of concentration camps and among a tiny minority who had made their way back from Hell. Coming from them, the word “miracle” was no exaggeration. Solidarity had united them. Friendship had been their ultimate bulwark against the Nazi machine’s constant violence, a violence that had ground millions to dust. And the true miracle was that their trifling defence had resisted savage and systematic oppression. Yet it can be easily explained: the body, even worn out, crumbles only if the spirit fails. Against the enormous enterprise of humiliation, demoralization, and dehumanization that was the concentration camps, solidarity and friendship alone were able to provide them the strength to fight on, to refuse to collapse into obedience and resignation. In the camps, to bend was to break.

  At Rose and Henriette’s, Fred related, “I was at the end of my rope that day, a real wreck. I’d gotten it hard that morning, in the quarry. And we were putting on the play that night in our Block.”

  The others, who also remembered, took their places on the terrace.

  “Come on, Fred. We need an SS officer. Not tonight, Pierre, I’m hurting.”

  “And I let them put on their play without me, broken and in pain.”

  Pierre called out to no one in particular, “Today… A Grand Ball at the Saint-Onge Palace!”

  Caraco, facing the orchestra, his conductor’s baton at the ready. On his signal, Alexandre, the violinist, begins to play energetically: Jealousy… Raymond, on the bandoneon, adds the frills and trills.

  Fred continued his story. The Kraut insulted him and beat him. A rain of punches. The stomach, the chest, the face. Blood poured out of him.

  Jealousy… François takes Pierre by the hand. Slowly, ceremonially, he brings him to the middle of the ballroom. François dances lasciviously with Mathilde. He’s rather tall, and Pierre rather short – an odd tango. And both are so thin, a danse macabre with tango steps.

  Then came the feet, Fred explained. Crumpled on the ground, the kicks came from all sides. Moans, cries of pain. But never a complaint, ever!

  The dancers take great strides. From time to time, with his left hand, Mathilde adjusts her hair. A vigorous step and then, pivoting, a brutal stop: the dance is done. The couple salutes, everyone claps. Not Fred, impossible.

  Alexandre settles in at the piano. In front of the imaginary keyboard, measured with a glance, he loudly cracks his knuckles. Pauses for inspiration, forehead lowered, gathering the notes in his head. Suddenly, he sets them free with great gestures, fingers splayed. Two minutes of intense gesticulation, then his last powerful chord. Motionless on his bench, eyes on the keys. He gets up and takes a bow.

  “I was bad off, and my friends noticed. They finished the show and started fussing over me. Pierre came back with a half-bowl of soup. ‘Drink it, Fred.’ ‘No, thanks. It won’t go down.’ ‘Make an effort, for Heaven’s sake.
Such good soup… it’s pistou! Paul made it for you.’”

  So he drank it and soon felt better. They were the Musketeers: “All for one and one for all!” There was no other way.

  From the Fresnes prison, my father was sent to Germany with some very heavy baggage – a death sentence and two letters that would open the gates of hell for him.

  On December 7, 1941, Hitler published the Nacht und Nebel (“Night and Fog”) directive according to which inhabitants of occupied territories who had been arrested for “terrorist activities” were to disappear into “night and fog” – the poetic wording that designated the concentration camps. The orders of Reichsführer Himmler, who’d been given the responsibility of implementing the directive, were as clear as day: “The Führer is of the opinion that in such cases, penal servitude or even a hard labour sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures that will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation to Germany serves this purpose.” From then on, the so-called terrorists would be sent to Germany to die in secret.

  In November 1943, my father was interned in the Neue Bremm camp as an NN. My mother was officially informed of his false disappearance. In our family’s case, a lowly bureaucrat, more expeditious than his superiors, must have preferred the destruction of hope to the sadistic uncertainty of the directive.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The guys had just sat down and hadn’t yet picked up the conversation. They first had to catch their breath after their long climb up the steep stairs. Their furtive contemplation of the sea and the islands, warmed by the last rays of sun, had lessened their anxieties. They began feeling the enveloping tenderness of their unbreakable friendship – a friendship once wrought in the heart of the deepest pain, each day shared.