A Pinch of Time

by Claude Tatilon

  Rose and Henriette took out the usual sweets. Fruits mostly, which came from the pòti that Rose made with Rachel and Eugène, her neighbours from the Place Joseph-Étienne. And a few figs from the garden, since it was summer.

  In the narrow yard that ran under the terrace and all the way to the edge of the cliff, ending in a point like a boat’s bow, there were three fig trees. Each one was different from the others. The first, hanging onto the small wall that separated our garden from that of our immediate neighbours, the Devaux, drew glory from being the earliest. Always a good fifteen days ahead of the other two, its Marseille figs (also called blanquettes or Athens figs) of a light-green shade, almost white, opened to reveal flesh the colour of beef blood, dotted with yellow. They were fleshy and sweet but without excess sugar and only mildly flavoured. The second tree, the tallest, had imperiously grown in the middle of the bow that it now shaded with its thick foliage. It would give violet figs with a blue sheen and red-orange flesh – Black Bourjassottes, they were called. They were prettier than the Marseille variety and better too, with a heartier taste. And we always had more of them, since their maturation would last into late October. The third, a simple figuieireto, was less than two metres high and had pushed out of the ground under the tall tree’s shadow. A bastard, no doubt, an unrecognizable species. The last to give us fruit, and never before mid-September, it produced small blackish figs, stunted and as wrinkled as an incubator baby’s behind. But when it came to taste, those figs won the grand prize! “Candied!” Rose would say. That was the word for them. They melted in your mouth, “making your taste buds dance,” Eugène the connoisseur would add, as much an expert on figs as on pistou. “The fig is Provence’s most generous fruit. When she is ripe, she lets you know by dropping a small pearl of syrup from her operculum, that little eye there, under her belly. And she embodies the three cardinal virtues: humility – she bows her head; poverty – her gown is torn; and contrition – she has a tear in her eye. She is also our most religious fruit,” concluded our miscreant, who never set foot in church. But aco’s de figo d’un autre panie: that’s another story.

  Of all the wonderful fruits, the ones I preferred were the small dried bananas that my father sometimes brought back from downtown. They were brown, as if caramelized, and had a slightly elastic consistency. A discovery. And they were sticky, adding to the pleasure of being able to suck your fingers meticulously so as to not lose a single morsel. Better than chocolate!

  Of course, there were also – but certainly not often enough, since the ingredients were hard to find – Henriette’s oreillettes, which Grandma would always herald with a great “And now, sirs, the oreillettes, fashioned by the beautiful Henriette’s nimble fingers!” That would always make my shy aunt blush. Especially when Caraco was there, his eyes full of desire.

  They could have married, those two. She went to vespers at Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde almost every Sunday. Yet it was not to be…

  That night, Le Grava arrived late. Completely red in the face, he shouted like Ruy Blas with an artillery man’s voice, “Bon appétit, boys!” His words held no bitterness; they were exploding with joy. “I’ve got good news, boys! My pal Jean from General Intelligence just told me they’re on the trail of one of our good friends. Guess who? Bet you’ll never guess…” A long silence. We were all trying to figure it out.

  “Tortora!”

  “Tortora? Our very own Tortora from Rue Paradis?”

  “In the flesh. After breaking plenty of our guys, including you and me, and living the high life during the Occupation, he disappeared incognito and went to cultivate his garden in a village in the Ardèche, near Aubenas.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Almost. Jean told me he’d pursue the search and keep me informed.”

  “I hope you’ll keep an eye on him.”

  “Don’t worry, Paulo. I’ll be in Jean’s office every day of the week.”

  “And then?”

  “Then? As soon as I have the address of that scavenger, I’ll go offer him last rites.”

  I can still see his eyes: like those of a child who’s been promised a visit to the circus next Thursday – and those of a caged lion that sees his lunch arriving.

  “Don’t you think the time for forgiveness…”

  “Quit your sermons, Caraco! You never met the Marseille Gestapo…”

  “It’s true Ludo, Grav is right. Tortora was despicable. Other people’s suffering gave him a hard-on. And if he’s still alive, we have to—”

  “Kill him. That’s that.”

  “No. Hatred, the more I think of it, the more…”

  “You think too much.”

  Then Le Grava explained that it wasn’t hate; it was just punishment – a big difference.

  “Are you sure there’s no hate in your heart?”

  “Yes. The horrors that rotten Frenchman committed…”

  Those horrors demanded that he be executed. For all the suffering he inflicted, for all those who died because of him. An eye for an eye. That’s how humanity is, what can you do…

  “I’ll go with you, Grav.”

  “Me, too!”

  “No thanks, boys… you know I prefer to work alone. But don’t worry, I’ll have a little chat with him first. I’ll pass on your greetings and remind him of his favourite game.”

  “The triangular ruler!”

  “Exactly.”

  “What kind of ruler is that, Papa?”

  Tortora didn’t use it to draw. How could he have drawn with those fat sausage fingers that kept him from any delicate work? Probably remembering elementary school, where his performance must have been modest, he held onto his small triangular aluminum ruler. Now an adult, he used it in a very personal manner. Hitting the prisoners’ fingers? Much too ordinary! His game consisted in putting it on the floor, in front of his victims, and forcing them to kneel on it. Then he jumped on their backs and threw himself into a gallop. “Giddy-up, girl, giddy-up!” Jumping up and down: guaranteed pain and humiliation. That’s how he smashed my father’s knee. The injury gave him terrible pain in the camps, and it never fully healed.

  That same night (Was it really? No matter), Little Pierre was all smiles. All afternoon, he’d been trying to find Mathilde. Just to tell her he was still alive, nothing else. Yet he couldn’t find her anywhere, not a trace, but what he’d discovered made him happy. The store her father owned on the Rive-Neuve Quay had just been sold and their sumptuous property in Roucas-Blanc was empty. The very popular purification had reversed the roles: it was now the biters’ turn to be bitten. Delighted at having had the presence of mind to extract himself from the situation he’d been in, Pierre was in high spirits, and we were treated to a lengthy scene between Jo and him – a sort of half-fiction story about how, after having come close to being caught in an SS ambush, he’d been picked up for certain of his writings. As for Jo, he told the story of how he managed to slip through their nets.

  Little Pierre had been caught with the others at the doctor’s house on May 25, 1943. “All of them driven off in a covered truck. As you know, I was watching it from the Azur Hôtel,” Jo recalled.

  Then, at a street corner, thanks to a turn taken too tightly that shook the truck carrying the prisoners to their fate, Little Pierre, the last one to be brought to the truck, pushed the soldiers on either side of him and leaped for freedom – or death. Three or four gunshots; the bullets didn’t hit him. A side street. He ran for it, he was free!

  “So I go straight to my house and explain the situation to my parents. I take everything that might be compromising – not much, in any case. My revolver, my address book (all in code, of course), a few drafts of some pamphlets I’d been told to write up. Then I make my way to the house of some good friends who live on the other side of our street. I spend the night there. The next morning, around seven, as I’m getting ready to go back to my place to grab a change of clothes, from the window of the room where I spent the night, I see a black front-wheel driv
e stop in front of my house. Three men get out: special-section militiamen. They ring at the door. It opens. They enter. They come back ten minutes later without my parents – thank Heaven. The hours pass, and I’m still afraid to leave my hideout. Then I decide to leave early in the afternoon, after thanking my hosts, because I don’t want to expose them any more than I already had. Two minutes with my parents, then I go seek refuge at a friend’s house, a guy I met in university who lives on the Corniche promenade, facing the monument to the Army of the Orient, about fifteen minutes away. He’s at home and agrees to shelter me. A good guy. I stay four days there, and then I go to Jo’s, who wasn’t there the night of the arrests. I take the Pointe-Rouge train to reach your house. Your wife tells me that she hasn’t seen you since the 25th and that she has no idea of where you might be.”

  “Michelle was careful. She didn’t even trust you. I’d told her so often to never trust anyone…”

  “Of course. But she does tell me she’ll try to find out more information. I understand and don’t push the matter. She gives me one of your caps and some fisherman’s equipment – a rod, line, hooks, a knife. Fifteen minutes later, I’m posted on a rock where she asked me to wait. I grab a couple of mussels and become an amateur fisherman! Two hours go by, and the funniest thing is that they’re really biting! Labrum, rainbow wrasse, bream, stripped bass – at least a kilo of rock fish, enough to make a great soup!”

  “The meek shall inherit the earth.”

  “You can say that again, Grav!”

  “And then I show up.”

  “Yup. I see you in your double-ender. I jump in and we embrace.”

  “Of course. I saw you go into that German truck, and I knew nothing about what happened next.”

  “We tell each other the two sides of the same story – your luck in front of the doctor’s house and my salto mortale. Then you give me the chance to hide with you in your cabin in Goudes.”

  “I’d been hiding out there for two nights already. I spent the night of May 25th in the hotel, and the next two nights at Eugène’s. I still remember Virginie’s delicious pasta.”

  “Sure, with only two tomatoes and a whisker of cheese…”

  “In the boat,” Little Pierre went on, “we talked, we tried to figure out what to do next… Maybe we could contact another network.”

  “But what did we know about the rest of the organization? Nothing, or next to nothing. No one left to link up with: how could we continue the fight?”

  “Personally, I had my idea: a friend on the railroad, a militant communist who participated actively in railway sabotage. I talked to you about it, Jo. You didn’t know what to think.”

  “I was hesitant, of course. But since I knew Gaby, your buddy, I got behind the idea…”

  “The next morning, you bring me back by boat to Pointe-Rouge, where I jump in a tram and go downtown. From there, I make my way to the Saint-Charles Station, always walking on the sidewalk opposite the flow of traffic, so as not to get caught from behind. I get to the bottom of the great stairway on a side street. Three Krauts are pacing near the entrance, machine guns in hand. Impossible to change directions without looking suspicious. But people who walk with confidence are rarely stopped. Grav, you’d shown me the trick many times; now it was my turn to try… I make it! I quickly climb the stairs without even noticing how steep they are. The last flight: the station’s rooftop appears just behind, then the entrance. Closely guarded, of course. I take a breather. I have to use the same tactic, there’s no other choice. It works again, Grav! There, I’m inside. And then, damn! I get caught – only six days after my first arrest. I have time to throw my revolver in a garbage can. But I’m a real idiot: I still have my notebook and drafts in my coat pocket. Too late! When I see Gaby again (and it’ll be the last time), I’ll be wearing the same bracelet as him… You know the rest: destination Gestapo, Rue Paradis, where I see a good many of you: Paul, Raymond, Grav, Bonnet, Sandre, and poor Christian. That guy was there too, that sheep… What was his name again?”

  “Moretti. At least, that’s what he said.”

  Eugène remembered him clearly and told them the story of what happened upstairs, in my parents’ empty apartment.

  “Do we know what happened to him?”

  “No idea.”

  Jo, who was never arrested and never sent to the STO due to his infirmity, will juggle grenades a while longer. Though he had to be more careful after the Corniche blockhaus incident, he still found a way to contact the fighters from “Combat,” the biggest resistance organization in the unoccupied zone. A municipal employee like my father, he started making fake identification papers again, and made good use of the arms cache in the Saint-Pierre cemetery. Combat would distribute these precious weapons to the resistance cells of the Southeast FFI. These two tasks accomplished, Jo decided to spend his leisure time fishing. Without grenades – or almost. But he quickly got bored of this idle existence and soon joined a resistance cell in the Var.

  As for Little Pierre, in good hands now, he let others decide his fate. “After Rue Paradis, it was the Fresnes prison, where I meet up with most of you. Then the Compiègne camp and finally Germany… Yes, we certainly took the five-star tour of Adolf’s installations!”

  TWENTY-SIX

  My father’s lost look. That way he had of suddenly leaving us to look beyond the present and fix his eyes, as if on a mirage, on a scene well behind him, in the haze of his past. One day, in the early eighties, we were in front of the Prefecture, on the terrace of a small bar where, as a young retiree, he’d often have a drink before his bus’ departure, the “12:25.” Flags flew from the top of the building in front of us, snapping in the wind, wrapping themselves around their mast, going from blue to white, and from white to red.

  He suddenly emerged from his silence. “The shock, that morning in November 1942, when I arrived at the town hall for the day’s work! There above the balcony, dancing in front of my eyes, an enormous flag, red like my shame…with a large white circle right in the middle…and in that circle, black like my anger, the arrogant spider that is the swastika. The bastards! That’s where he’d brought France, the Old Puppet… Yet he’d still have the kids sing in school, ‘Fly, dear flag / fly up high / France’s icon / purveyor of hope.’ You sang that in Moustiers, didn’t you?”

  “No, I don’t think so. The teacher, Madame Dupuis, would make us sing Maréchal, nous voilà. Always following it with verse from La Marseillaise, though.”

  “A real disgrace for the country! Can you believe it? A government of rats elected by a majority of Frenchmen?”

  Then he told me the story of the first visit Pétain made to Marseille as the newly named head of state, on the 3rd and 4th of December 1940.

  “He was seen as a saviour by a defeated and discouraged population that swallowed all his nonsense whole. ‘A partial occupation is better than a total occupation, we will be able to soften the conditions of the truce, our prisoners will return home soon…’ The shield strategy, they called it! What baloney! ‘A moral abuse of trust,’ Blum said. Much easier to swallow words softened by patriotic spit than the words of an inflexible de Gaulle, determined to fight it out with Hitler’s soldiers: ‘France is not alone… This war is a world war… The flame of French resistance must not wane, nor shall it wane.’”

  Very few were able to hear the June 18th declaration and even fewer actually listened to it. “By speaking to what is most desired by a man – the taste for rest – one always makes it easier on oneself. The desire for honour, though, does not come without a terrible price towards oneself and towards others.” [9]

  “And then there was Mers el-Kébir.”

  “Indeed, son. A disastrous English operation that de Gaulle had supported… A necessary evil. Nazi propaganda didn’t miss the chance to blow it out of proportion and present it as a crime against France.”

  “Where were you on the 3rd of December?”

  “At home. I was sleeping. I’d spent the night in t
own with Le Grava, Jo, Little Pierre, and a few others – sticking up pamphlets that we’d hastily prepared… So that France may be victorious, England must! With the cross of Lorraine on it… A few hundred of them…”

  My dear Popaul’s eyes would light up then: forty years younger all of a sudden.

  “Where did you stick them?”

  “Below the Canebière, on the Quai des Belges, and around here too, all around the Prefecture. We were sure that the official procession – the Marshal would be coming through the city in the days ahead – would go through one of those locations.”

  “Was it dangerous?”

  “Not really. But there had been arrests in the preceding days – a few thousand undesirables, especially communists, who had been put inside for the duration of the celebrations – and the cops were on edge. We spent the night playing cat and mouse. And since it was my first mission, and I had a child at home, I was nervous.”

  “What was the result of your operation?”

  “Good question. After the celebrations, most of the pamphlets were still where we put them. So they’d been read. Now, to maintain that our counter-propaganda had been effective… It would have taken much more than that to change public opinion. But it wasn’t useless. Especially for us: it gave us the desire to continue and do more. We were ready for the Resistance.”

  In 1940, the French accepted, with a strong majority, to support the new State, falling into the trap of the lesser evil, refusing to see that it was essentially accepting the Nazi victory and, soon, their dictatorship. But a few of them who had their eyes open didn’t see it in that way. I’m still proud today that my father was one of the righteous ones who chose the right camp: Liberty, beloved Liberty!

  One day Doctor C. told me how my father had been recruited.