A Pinch of Time

by Claude Tatilon

  “He knew Jo, and Jo knew François. François, who had been my patient, was one of the first to join the cell, towards the end of 1940. He knew that both Jo and your father had reacted positively to the June 18th declaration and that they were hankering for some action… Maybe make their way to London to join the ranks of the Free French Forces. So it was François who brought them to me in January 1941. We were barely a half-dozen back then. In December, during the Marshal’s visit to Marseille, they pasted up Gaullist pamphlets on the official route. During those sad days of hysteria, I was in the Saint-Pierre prison with other communist sympathizers. There were more than twenty thousand of us who’d been arrested to prevent any agitation.”

  “Twenty thousand!”

  “Even more than that. In the Saint-Pierre prison and in the Chave prison too, in the city police stations and movies theatres. Even in boats. During that short stay in prison, I met Alfred, then a young officer. He was guarding us. We talked a little and I quickly understood where his sentiments lay. That’s why, later that year, I went looking for him. Resistance movements were being born and I had decided to set up my own cell. I already had three men with me, Berthier and Armand, whom I met in Saint-Pierre, and my son Christian.

  He motioned gently towards his son’s portrait, as if the boy were really there.

  “I recruited the first members of my network in prison, which just goes to show you that sometimes, good things come from adversity.”

  Then he took out a large format magazine, L’Illustration, dated December 14, 1940. Occupying the entire front page was a picture of the old Marshal, walking proudly at the head of the official procession. Beneath, the caption read, “Exiting the train station, Marshal Pétain reviews the honour guard.”

  “The caption is wrong. As you can see, they’re in front of the Prefecture.”

  “Right, I recognize the place. How did the journalists make such a mistake?”

  “Back then, authenticity was the least of their worries.”

  Four large pages, nine pictures, four of which showed a huge crowd. Plucking the petals of propagandist rhetoric, commenting with a touch of humour on its cheap lyricism, the doctor pointed out the tendentious aspect of a text that certainly fit the times.

  Important news suddenly galvanized the sleeping city: Marshal Pétain, head of state, is arriving. Immediately, Marseille awakens, becomes animated, is reborn. For the past two days, all Provence has been making its way to the ancient Phocée. Hotels are refusing customers, streets are filled, building fronts are adorned. First, posters, flags, banners, festoons, garlands. […] A blue sky woven from unreal silk, a powerful wind, almost warm, following a cold day. It seems as if even the sun of Provence wishes to celebrate the Marshal.

  The doctor and the thousands of other potential opponents to the regime who’d been pushed aside, the closing of all cafés downtown, the colossal deployment of police forces, the exceptional security measures, the small pamphlets that contested the whole affair were not – of course – mentioned by the journalist. For him, everything was swell.

  A huge crowd takes up position, in tight ranks, all along the Canebière and lines the vast open space – the Quai des Belges – that precedes the iridescent waters of the Old Port. Sun and smiles. Flags at every window, ribbons on every corsage – and people, countless people, as have never been seen in Marseille, up to the cornice, to the terraces, to the rooftops.

  There, all is beauty and jubilation, calm and dignity when the first day in Marseille ends with “the deep and tumultuous voice of ships’ sirens, the song of gold and blue waves that become iridescent with crimson in honour of the great red sun that sets and suddenly sinks behind the formidable black shadow of the Château d’If, crouching in the sea.”

  Nonsense! They tortured language to make it say what they wanted to hear.

  After Marseille, Toulon. Same writer, same bombastic prose, perfectly adequate to the subject matter. On the battleship Strasbourg, where he reviews the crew, the Marshal stops for a second in front of the “right side of the hangar whose siding had been pierced by a falling shell on July 3, 1940, in Mers el-Kébir.” For a moment, he “remains pensive in front of the injury sustained by the beautiful ship, then, with his clear look, he fixes his eyes on the stern where a flag that was torn by shards of metal, yet still floats in the breeze; it too was wounded in Mers el-Kébir.”

  After Toulon, Avignon. “The commander-in-chief of the French State continues his tour of France. Wherever he goes, he sows hope, faith, courage; he reanimates, he exalts, he encourages – in three words: he remakes France.”

  The doctor also dissected the pictures. “If the propaganda in the text is painfully obvious, that of the pictures is much more subtle. They are good documentary photos that display what is mentioned in their captions: the Marshal reviewing a company… a crowd gathered on the Quai des Belges… a visit to the Army of the Orient monument… But they also pass a strong emotional message. Without exaggerating too much, the photographer shows us the greatness of the Marshal and the high esteem in which a hoodwinked population holds him. Look at the one on the cover. Pétain stands at the tip of the triangle formed by the crowd watching the procession; he is shot from slightly underneath. He is saluting a row of militiamen fixed in perfect formation. His salute is energetic, elbow far from his body. He is advancing with firm steps, his eyes straight forward, determined, his mien is serious; the cane in his left hand is nothing but a prop. He doesn’t lean on it. He looks good, the old chief! The flags we see in the background emerge over their heads, giving a positive feeling about the length of the procession. We have to make everyone forget about Montoire.”

  Montoire is a small city in the Loir-et-Cher département, near Vendôme. Pétain had met Hitler there six weeks prior, on October 24th. Their handshake, which shocked more than a few Frenchmen (the German press publicized it to the hilt), prefigured the Vichy regime’s collaborationist policies. A fool’s bargain would be struck: Germany held France at its mercy and the Marshal would become the Führer’s puppet. In 1942, Pierre Laval would join in on the fun and start pulling the strings of the Old Puppet, playing the enemy’s game with great talent.

  “Look at how the point of view dominates the crowd. The framing is clever: the photo covers nearly the entire page; there are almost no margins. The effect is to makes us think of a human tide: people seem to be arriving from all sides at the same time.”

  A good photograph can be much more convincing than a bad article.

  When I earned my baccalauréat, the doctor and his wife gave me a sumptuous present: L’illustration from December 14, 1940, and the Pan Trilogy, in a superb leather-bound edition, gold-lined… and signed by the author!

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  All that summer of 1945, my father and his friends would regularly meet up on Grandma Rose’s terrace. As the moon slowly followed its path in the sky, towards the stars, they would remember their rare good moments – the soups they made, the cigarettes they shared – and especially their bad ones: the fevers, the typhus, the Homeric diarrheas. Each story would thumb its nose at death. I was terrified by some of them: the powerful jaws of the German shepherds, the Krauts’ gummi, that truncheon lined with electrical cable covered in rubber. But I wouldn’t have missed a single one of their heroic nights of recollection for all the chocolate in the world.

  My fear would soon be conquered by the good humour of these fellows who, at every second word, would slap each other on the back. Today, it seems to me, all that energy was spent in the desire to forget: not to be thrown out of bed in the middle of the night by a voice barking orders, to achieve amnesia and close the Book of Horrors once and for all. They were trying to rebuild themselves and attain that wisdom that Caraco preached. When you’ve seen with your own eyes a truck’s exhaust feeding deadly gas into a shower room, when you’ve heard with your own ears the muffled cries emanating from a crematory oven and smelled with your own nose the smoke from the tall stacks with its sick
ening, sweet odour of silt that is the smell of burning flesh, what is there to fear? You might as well catch a cold.

  Between them and myself, there was a closeness helped along by my father, a complicity that brought me much nearer to him, so much so that I sometimes forgot Moustiers and its charming little world for days on end.

  When one of them would see Rose coming with a hot drink and a few bites to eat – “Mèfi, boys!” – the signal was given. All of them, recovering their old conditioned reflexes, would change the entire scene in a flash. Suddenly they became Zen, with smiles like the Buddha. They’d simulate reverie, hands behind their heads or folded on their stomachs, discussing some soothing subject. I quickly learned how to join in their nirvana, blissfully embedded in my chair.

  When Henriette would come, the alert was quicker still. She was so sensitive, they’d have scared her stiff with their stories from another world.

  And once the danger had passed, the question would be asked. “Now where were we?”

  “You were talking about the role calls in the freezing cold… the Kommandos… the lice trade…”

  “The lice trade? What’s that, Papa?”

  “You know the SS feared lice like the devil since they carried typhus and could contaminate them. Everywhere were signs saying, ‘Eine Laus, deine Tod: a louse is your death!’ That’s why a single louse was worth a fortune: a whole day of campo!”

  “Campo?”

  “A day of rest, for disinfection.”

  And then the subject turned to the Sunday soup, as clear as every other day’s, but in which a few pieces of meat floated – stringy meat that could only be dog. “At least it was nourishing!”

  Horror stories made from witches’ brew.

  That shameless son who steals his father’s bread, wolfs it down, then swallows his soup in a single gulp. To an indignant Caraco, the boy answers indifferently that his father is dying, so he no longer needs anything. The father looks on with resignation – not with supplication – he is beyond everything. Our very own preacher of non-violence punches the impious son, his just desserts. “Brotdieb! – Bread thief!” The most potent insult of all in a place where bread, as bad as it may be, was more than just coin, it was a symbol of life.

  The well-trained dog, excited by its master, that in one terrifying bite rips out the throat of a “Muslim” lying on the ground. In the camps, the human rags that were no longer anything but skin over skeleton were called Muselmänner. With grace and dark humour, the prisoners granted Islamic fatalism – inch Allah! – to those who, devoured by the demons of hunger, wandered in a daze, looking for something to eat – anything, really: roots, grass, leaves, paper, rotting wood…

  In the Buchenwald quarry. A prisoner, carrying a stone weighing several kilos on his shoulder, collapses, exhausted. An SS officer approaches, takes his luger out and presses it against the forehead of the poor man, who tenses his eyelids till tears flow and he wets his pants… The SS officer changes his mind and holsters his gun. The condemned man opens his eyes, smiling to the heavens. But the SS calls a Kapo over to finish the job for him. The Kapo comes running, bends over the man, throwing his gummi aside, and takes him by the neck with both hands. Throttles him with all his might. An empty body now. The master appreciates the show, the student is proud; they understand each other.

  And then, of course, the punishment of the post, which of the boys, only Alexandre had suffered. It was in Dachau. He was tied, hands behind his back, to a chain tied to a hook, then forced to climb a stepladder that was pulled out from under him. A violent shock for the shoulders. “You swung a few centimetres from the ground, trying to lean forward as much as possible, to avoid having your arms go too far back.” But little by little, resistance would wane, and the hanged man would end up in complete extension, incredibly painful. He’d faint and have a pail of freezing water thrown on him. Duration of the punishment: one hour. After that, it lost its efficiency. From fainting to the pail of water, the poor man would usually enter a catatonic state that would inhibit all pain. Or sometimes he’d simply be dead.

  Some of the other boys had experienced the punishment of the stool, a softer version of the post. My father was a regular customer. “For the slightest thing, they’d make you climb onto a high narrow stool. You had to stay there, squatting on the tip of your toes, arms pointing out at shoulder level… For a quarter of an hour! Mission impossible: muscle fatigue would quickly make you tumble off your perch. Two or three tumbles, and the acrobatics would always end with a most substantial reward – twenty-five blows from the gummi across your back. Offered with much generosity.”

  The Dachau infirmary, the Revier. Fred wandered in with a nail infection on the middle finger of his left hand. He was in tremendous pain and couldn’t work. He left the infirmary a few days later, able to work – with a finger less. “Heiden operated on me. No anaesthesia, of course; they had to save their ethyl chloride. Just a punch in the chin to knock me out when I started screaming too loudly.” Josef Heiden? A Kapo who had the Revier SS’s permission to do whatever he wanted and who terrorized both patients and nurses by trying out surgery from time to time. Fred was furious. “A monster of perversion who beat the SS at their own game, a vampire thirsting for blood, Heiden was!” Impossible to describe him without abusing clichés and hyperbole, though words would never come close to the odious reality of the man. “It wouldn’t have been better if I’d had a real surgeon. Either they sent novices who needed experience before going to the front lines or experienced doctors doing research for the Nazi war medicine.”

  Never think of those horrors again…

  One last story has never left me; it has a hold on me like the jaws of a German shepherd. In the rare cases when a miracle-man managed to survive the treatment inflicted, Josef Heiden would be called in again to quickly clean up the mess. He’d finish his executioner’s job by rolling his victims in a blanket, then placing them under a freezing shower for some time. Then, tightly bound in their blankets that would shrink as they dried, the poor men were dumped in a corner of a room where, shaking uncontrollably, they would die, tetanized, in horrible convulsions.

  One mid-August night, I remember it well. The moon was high and full like a large white stain over the Frioul Islands. That night, the laughter had quickly been overshadowed by an embarrassed, heavy conversation.

  “We know who!” my father declared. We: he and Little Pierre. What did they know? An enormous secret that had been at the centre of many discussions in the Blocks of the various camps where they lived out their fragile existence. They knew who had given them up – my father never said “ratted them out.” He and Pierre knew who’d sent twenty-one of them to their deaths.

  “What? You know the son of a bitch and you haven’t said anything?”

  “Wait, Sandre. Imagine if it was one of us…”

  My father’s words froze me to the marrow. Around me were dumbstruck faces.

  “And imagine,” Little Pierre went on, “that the man broke under torture on Rue Paradis…”

  He could evoke torture with poignant intensity. “Barbary in its purest form! Imagine, facing you, a sinister face that intends one thing and that’s to reduce you to a pulp. A face as tight as a fist that will relax only at the sound of your cries. You try to resist as much as possible, you want to hide any sign of distress that would only serve to heighten your torturer’s cruelty. A one-sided heroic battle where every blow is directed at you. Finally, the moment comes when you lose all strength and faint – a real luxury! But the pails of freezing water thrown in your face quickly return you to the harsh reality of your position. Hang on a minute more, do not give in… but for how long?”

  “But wait a minute… If it was on Rue Paradis, before our arrests, then it’s got to be…”

  My father interrupted Alexandre. His deductions were leaping too far ahead of the conversation.

  “You have to remember, Sandre, how it was on Rue Paradis. There was Tortora with his heavy hands
. And Max the Pervert… You must remember him, right? He had a particular affection for you…”

  Alexandre did remember. I could read it on his face. Paler than the descending moon…you could measure the cruelty of the humiliation inflicted on a man as proud as he was – a “native of Calenzana,” as he liked to introduce himself. He wasn’t the only one who still carried, somewhere on his body, the scars of cigarette burns, for Max the SS enjoyed stubbing out his smoke on some particularly sensitive part of the body. My Popaul had his around his nipples: three or four stigmata on each side – well-aimed shots.

  “So,” he continued, “if you’d broken down, Sandre? Or you, Raymond?”

  “I’d have killed myself!”

  “That’s what he did. But slowly, staying with us until the end and letting his remorse eat him up slowly. It took two years…”

  “Two years watching you waste away next to him; he resigned himself to his suffering as a form of expiation,” Caraco added. He probably had no idea who the man might be, since he came from a cell in the Var region.

  “He died in our arms, in Dachau,” Little Pierre remembered, “two weeks before liberation.”

  “He gave us his secret at the last moment. Then he left us, relieved, his eyes burning with tears of gratitude when we promised never to say anything to his wife.”

  “Madeleine?”

  “Yes, Madeleine.”

  “So it was Armand! You did well, boys. May he rest in peace.”

  Caraco had just understood, too. A forgiving silence settled over the group for the rest of the night.

  One month later, Madeleine received the Legion of Honour in the name of her glorious late husband. Posthumously. The doctor, who had to leave his son’s body in Dachau, managed to find the strength to say a few moving words to her. The boys congratulated her and embraced her affectionately.

  The regulars met on the terrace all the way into mid-September, until the night Caraco arrived alone, without Raymond.