The Patagonian Hare

by Claude Lanzmann

  Pétain’s speeches brought him back to reality, to what was important: that evening he took me aside and said, ‘You can’t keep Draggy any more.’ I pestered, I protested, I begged, I ranted and raved but he stood firm. He pointed to the grey wall and said, ‘From now on we have to be as grey as that wall, we need to disappear, not draw attention to ourselves. In a few months, your dog will draw attention to us all.’ He was right, I knew it, but I begged him to wait for a while. But the very next day he gave Draggy to a vet, a stout man with a brutish, ruddy face, asking him to find the dog a new master and also to give him his vaccinations, since it was time. But the man drank too much and made a mistake: instead of a vaccination, he gave my dog a lethal injection. My father heard the news at the same moment as I did; I saw the pain in his eyes and could not bring myself to reproach him. Thinking about it now, maybe he had in fact condemned Draggy to death himself, asked the vet to put him to sleep; I’ll never know. It would have been difficult to find enough fresh meat to feed a hungry adult dog and it would have been expensive. Was this something he had considered?

  Money was tight at home: my father’s enforced work did not bring enough for us to live on. Over the summer, we learned that recruiters were looking for labourers to help with the grape harvest on the vast vineyards in the south of France – in Le Gard, L’Hérault, Le Roussillon; around Nîmes, Montpellier and Narbonne. This was a well-established custom: every autumn the major wine growers, whose estates numbered hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hectares, recruited seasonal workers from the Massif Central who were employed either as ‘cutters’ or as ‘porters’. It was called – it still is, I think – a colle of grape-pickers, the word may be a contraction of collecte. There was a minimum age; they would not take anyone under sixteen. My brother and I – he was thirteen and a half, I was not yet fifteen – were big for our ages so we lied shamelessly and even succeeded in getting taken on as porters, hauling baskets of grapes, since that was better paid. The ruse was only possible because of the chaos and general disarray that followed France’s defeat and the consequent lack of manpower: French men were on the run or prisoners of war in their thousands. We boarded a train jammed with boys from the Auvergne singing at the top of their lungs as though heading to war and, via Langeac, Langogne and Alès, made it through the Cévennes overnight to the flat countryside of the Pays du Gard. The boundless estate we were to work on, located in the commune of Junas-Aujargues, was the property of an aristocrat in big boots, a marquis if memory serves, who looked us up and down like cattle. Our dormitory was a huge but overcrowded barn where we were told to dump our rucksacks only to be immediately thrown in at the deep end without being given a moment’s rest, beneath the watchful and superior stares of the foremen. There were the ‘cutters’ who, with a flourish of their gouets – their billhooks – would cut through the stem of each heavy bunch of grapes, which then fell into their baskets. Once the baskets were full, they were tipped into the bacholes – large panniers made of zinc or wicker – which were strapped to the backs of the porters. Jacques and I, exhausted from the journey, disoriented by our surroundings, drunk on sunshine and on the plump, delicious grapes we simply could not resist gorging on as they were loaded (as a result of which, that first night, we suffered a bout of ‘the fabulous shits’, to quote a phrase from Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs), collapsed in full view of everyone, after a vain and heroic struggle to stay upright under the weight of our panniers – which were only two-thirds full. Meanwhile all around us the other porters hurried, carrying their fifty-kilo panniers of grapes like experienced professionals. This was a disaster: we were forced to confess our ages and the marquis, who was overseeing the work, wanted to turn us away immediately but our genuine tears and explanations of how much we wanted to help our father persuaded one of the foremen to take pity on us, and he agreed to make us cutters, a task more suited to our strength and age.

  We slept on beds of straw. My brother was on my left and on my right was Jacky, a sailor and a very handsome lad, much older than the rest of us who had travelled a lot in the navy before the war. He had taken Jacques and me under his wing. One night, by the light of the low moon framed in the wide-open doorway of the barn, Jacky started to masturbate and encouraged me to join him. I refused, in spite of my fondness for him, but mostly because his penis, stubby and thick and dark, so fascinated me that I could not allow myself to be distracted by anything else: it was the first time I had seen anyone masturbate.

  There was another first, three weeks later at the end of the harvest: our first wages, the first money earned by the sweat of our backs. I felt a pride so new to me that the idea of spending even one franc seemed sacrilegious. I had to bring the entire sum home and give it to our father. At the station in Nîmes, waiting for the train to Brioude, I refused to give in to my brother’s pleadings, even though, like him, I was dying of thirst. We were, when I think back, strange children, ‘meek, obedient and pure’ – as Sartre describes Genet somewhere – despite, or perhaps because of, the extraordinary obstacles we had been confronted with from an early age. The solemn, almost ceremonial handing over of our money to Papa was my reward for everything.

  Shortly after we got home, Papa sublet two rooms to a Monsieur Legendre, a manager in some business that had been forced to relocate to Brioude, and his secretary, Mademoiselle Bordelet. Monsieur Legendre, fifty years old with a big, grey, handlebar moustache that was waxed, combed and brushed, a true Frenchman confident of his authority and his rights, took the room on the first floor above the dining room. The secretary’s room was across the landing beyond the stairwell. My brother and I, who slept on the floor above, quickly guessed the nature of the frequent comings and goings between Mademoiselle Bordelet’s room and Monsieur Legendre’s. There was little to do, there were few distractions and no nightlife in Vichy France; our lodgers came home as soon as they finished work and did not go out again. Mademoiselle Bordelet prepared their meals in her employer’s room, which had a gas ring and a coal-fired stove. We had our dinner later, we meaning Jacques, Évelyne and me, my father and his companion Hélène, a beautiful buxom Norman girl from Caen, not Jewish at all. Here too there was another first: the springs of Monsieur Legendre’s bed began to squeak as the five of us sat down to dinner, the squeaking grew louder and faster, the rhythm attained cruising speed and then, in a frantic, thunderous sprint, culminated in a contented coughing-fit. The whole thing was all over in three minutes. Jacques, Évelyne and I glanced at each other, though we did not dare meet Papa’s smile, and Hélène remarked, ‘They could at least wait, it’s not so late.’ There followed other sounds – a patter of dainty footsteps, the clang of a saucepan, a tap running, the toilet flushing…

  The whole thing started up again the following week, when my brother and I were alone in the house. Jacques leapt up as soon as we heard the inaugural squeak of Monsieur Legendre’s bed and raced up the stairs. I followed my little brother, hypocritically forcing myself to move with slightly more dignity. It didn’t last: Monsieur Legendre’s pounding had reached its peak, although it could not drown out the counterpoint – much more overwhelming to us – of Mademoiselle Bordelet’s moans. It was the first time either of us had heard a woman in ecstasy. Jacques, his eye pressed to the keyhole, was masturbating furiously, bestially. I tried to push him away and take his place, but his eye and his feet were fixed to the spot. Almost immediately we heard the last sprint and the final coughing fit and I realized, in that precise moment, that Mademoiselle Bordelet was tearing herself away from the bed and my brother could see. And what he could see was so new, so impressive, so riveting, that his hand stopped for a moment in amazement. He could not keep to himself such a secret, such a treasure, and he signalled that it was my turn to peer through the keyhole. In spite of the narrowness of the keyhole, the laws of optics meant that his field of vision was wide. The earthenware stove on which the secretary was heating food and the saucepan of water we had just heard clatter was in the centre of the frame, and I
suddenly saw the extraordinary sight my brother had wanted to share with me: she was coming back. I saw her, naked, first one buttock as she set the saucepan on the stove, then her entire arse, callipygian I would describe it as now, perfectly curved. Then, as she leaned over the stove, I saw her in profile, saw her breast, the left breast because of the way the furniture was placed and the keyhole framed the scene, a firm, pert breast. Her movements were quick, precise, organized, methodical: the water in the saucepan was at precisely the right temperature, and as soon as she left Monsieur Legendre’s embrace, she picked it up, rushed to the bidet in the bathroom, where – with no regret, no emotion – she washed away the humours and secretions of the cougher: contraception being unheard of in illo tempore. I have only the vaguest memory of Mademoiselle Bordelet’s face, but the glimpses of her body are indelibly inscribed into my veins, onto my memory. Whenever we could, my brother and I took up our post outside the door, careful not to be caught by our parents or by Mademoiselle Bordelet herself: she sometimes unexpectedly went back to her room to sleep or to get some file she had forgotten. When she did, we just had time to launch ourselves up the spiral staircase leading to the floor above. She dashed across the landing, looking straight ahead, barely covered by a short, see-through nightdress that drove me insane. I am sure she knew that we were standing guard outside their door while she was being mounted. She knew, she must have known, and these flits to her room were as much to stir up her own desire as to kindle ours. Did I ever masturbate on that landing? Honestly, I must have done but I was not, from that age onwards, keen on masturbation. I did, on the other hand, imagine every possible violation of the mature Mademoiselle, devising meticulous plans – with and without my brother’s participation. And I confess that I almost acted on them, almost crept into her room while she was sleeping. But there were too many people living in the house; this alone prevented my criminal plan. Had I gone through with it, I firmly believe that she would have joyfully taken my virginity; I certainly could not even have imagined I would have been charged with rape. But all these things took place in a very different time. I’ve just remembered her first name: she was called Denise. Life in France having resumed its normal routine, Monsieur Legendre and Denise were called back to head office in the spring of 1941, leaving Brioude and our house. Serious things could now begin.

  The first anti-Semitic law passed by the Vichy regime in 1940, the even more draconian measures of June 1941 together with the rising tide of anti-Jewish propaganda and abuse on the radio fuelled my father’s fatalism, gave it something on which to feed and grow. Though he knew nothing about the deportations that would come later, nor, obviously, about the Final Solution, he was undoubtedly aware of the arrests of foreign Jews in the south of France that began after the Statut des Juifs was passed in October, and the major roundups of Jews in the Occupied Zone in May, August and December 1941; he was filled with a terrible foreboding. Saving his three children, I learned only much later, was his chief concern. He spent several nights alone, digging a deep underground shelter in the garden where we might hide if there were a raid. The opening to this ‘cave’, some fifty metres behind the house, was hidden by branches. One day – or rather one night – our training began. My brother and I shared a bedroom; Évelyne was next door. I forgot to mention that my father had taken an oil can and, with fanatical care, had oiled every door, hinge and lock on every floor so that we could move about the preternaturally quiet house soundlessly; he had even found a way – having always been good with his hands – of silencing the creaking floorboards and the stairs. Now that Monsieur Legendre had left, he did not have to worry about squeaking bedsprings. When bedtime came and we put on our pyjamas, he taught us how to lay out our clothes in precisely the order we would need them to quickly get dressed again. He explained everything, so we knew that the doorbell would ring while we were fast asleep and we would have to make a dash for it as though the Gestapo really were breaking down the door. ‘I’ll be timing you,’ he said. We didn’t think of it as a game for very long. The bell was operated by pulling a chain and it pealed loud and clear. Suddenly, this unforgettable, imperious tolling, the clapper striking repeatedly against the bell, indicated that this was not someone politely waiting to be let in, but announced instead a brutal intrusion. We woke with a start and one of us went to rouse our little sister, still fast asleep; we quickly dressed in the dark, our actions becoming almost automatic as the training progressed, silently scrambling down two flights of stairs in pitch darkness, opening the door to the courtyard as though by magic and racing to the end of the garden where we pushed aside the branches and replaced them behind us, and sheltered in the cave where we waited, breathless. We waited, we watched for him, he might be fast or slow, it depended. He pretended to search for us, and never failed to find us. Through the branches we would see his SS jackboots, and heard his anguished Jewish father’s voice: ‘You moved, you made a noise.’ ‘No, Papa, that was a branch cracking.’ ‘You were talking, I heard you, they would have found you.’ This would go on until finally he told us we could come out. He was not play-acting. He was the SS and their dogs. The training sessions were random, we were woken with a start at different times of night, but it paid off: we broke world speed records, each time beating our previous performance. In the last timed trial, he calculated that from leaping out of bed and creeping into the cave, it took a breathless one minute and twenty-nine seconds.

  Neither the Gestapo nor the Milice ever rang our bell. It is true that my father, who had joined the Resistance early on – something I was unaware of – had taken other precautions after the massive roundup of Jews in the summer of 1942. With a number of carefully hand-picked Jewish volunteers – including me – he organized nightly bicycle patrols across Brioude, keeping watch on the approach roads from Clermont-Ferrand and Le Puy-en-Velay. From November, units of the Wehrmacht and of the German police had been permanently stationed in our sub-prefecture with their own Kommandantur and all related services. An unmistakeable sign that a roundup was imminent was the presence of the trucks, grey-green – ‘the colour of the Germans’, as Michael Podchlebnik, a survivor of Chełmno, says in Shoah. Sadly, he is dead now – men such as he should never die. A group of several such vehicles indicated that registered Jews were to be taken from their homes and rounded up at dawn. We, too, knew their addresses and the patrols would set off to warn anyone we thought might be in danger, who might need to hide or flee. We know that on two occasions, thanks to our efforts, those who arrived to round them up came away empty-handed.

  Every time I think about Monny de Boully and of his appearance so early one morning, not at the front door, but at the back, as though he had materialized out of the garden, the lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ immediately come to mind. Except for the time (it happened not at midnight, but at daybreak), they perfectly describe what I felt:

  Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,

  Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

  While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

  As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

  ‘’Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door –

  Only this, and nothing more.’

  Or in Baudelaire’s translation:

  Une fois, sur le minuit lugubre, pendant que je méditais, faible et fatigué,

  Sur maint précieux et curieux volume d’une doctrine oubliée,

  Pendant que je donnais de la tête, presque assoupi, soudain il se fit un tapotement,

  Comme de quelqu’un frappant doucement, frappant à la porte de ma chambre.

  ‘C’est quelque visiteur,’ murmurai-je, ‘qui frappe à la porte de ma chambre;

  Ce n’est que cela et rien de plus.’

  It was at dawn in the spring of 1942. The ‘little perceptions’ instilled in me by my father’s training for the terrible bell must still have had me on alert. How coul
d one ever wake unless one was already alert? (This I learned later at Tübingen from the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the subject of my postgraduate degree in philosophy.) And Monny, with his gentle tapping, fell somewhat short of the rapping of Poe’s Raven. He tapped at the back door with such incongruous quietness that I was obliged to get out of bed and pad barefoot down the soundless stairs, as though I were the one about to burst in on someone, catch him unawares, to press my ear to the door, fathoming the source of this incessant pattering, so unlike the brutal pounding I had been primed to anticipate and, finally, to open the door. There before me stood a stranger carrying a small suitcase, a man of about forty, tall, with a high forehead and eyes that shone with kindness and intelligence, though his face was a mask of fear. ‘You are Claude,’ he murmured, it was not even a question, and he brought his finger to his lips and whispered, ‘Shhh… I’m Monsieur Sylvestre.’ I’d never heard of a Monsieur Sylvestre – Amédée Sylvestre, according to the identity card he insisted on showing several times to my father, who was also awake by now. His papers were false. He had arrived in Brioude on the morning train, having suffered the rigorous, fanatical checks of the Germans as he crossed the border between occupied France and the so-called ‘Free Zone’, the French state of Vichy. It was an act of great courage, one that could have cost him his life. Terror and pride vied with one another in his face, terror at the risks he had so recently run and pride at having come through. Only love – the mad passion he bore my mother – could have given him the strength to face such dangers head on, especially as they had both only recently escaped the clutches of the Gestapo. While going to visit their friend the poet Max Jacob, in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, they had been arrested on the platform at Orléans station by the Milice picking people out by their facial features. They were not mistaken: my mother was obviously, strikingly Jewish. As Marthe Robert wrote to me, when my mother died in 1995: ‘My dear Claude, I read about Paulette’s death in Le Monde today. As you know, I knew her well. There was a time when I went to visit her regularly, and I enjoyed her company. I particularly admired her beauty, she seemed to me to embody all the nobility of the ancient daughters of Israel.’ Rereading Marthe’s words, I cannot but be reminded of the congratulations of Monsieur Lebègue, a professor at the Sorbonne, before whom I had to give a commentary on a Renaissance play, Garnier’s Les Juives [The Jewesses] for my licence ès lettres in classical literature: ‘That ancient woman, who walks in front, is some great Lady. I see that all respect her…’