Poum and Alexandre

by Catherine de Saint Phalle

  The war is there also, waiting in the wings, holding its breath. My father has one surviving connection from his time in the Resistance. Roland Pré is silent and thin, with a face like wax. When he comes over, they don’t talk about it but it’s there, with them in the room, in their glances, in the silence that comes and goes, in their strange, small smiles of regret, in their hands that stray to each other’s shoulders. They are distant, almost formal with each other, yet helplessly familiar, intimate, as if warding off something, a fear they also yearn for.

  My father rarely speaks of the Resistance, but now without taking his eyes from the sky, he suddenly does. Maybe only this can sweep the lingering image of Marguerite away.

  ‘Once I was the contact for a British pilot. I was chosen because I spoke English. Our meeting had been set for the Saint-Lazare train station. He was standing exactly where it had been arranged, at the top of the Metro steps, just where they come up in the middle of the station. I found him easily – a parachuted Englishman with “English” written all over him. I walked up and stood next to him casually, without looking at him, but before I could slip him my address, he murmured from the corner of his mouth, without moving his lips, “Scram, I’m burnt,” and ran down the Metro steps, drowning himself instantly in the crowd. Obviously the Gestapo had sprung his last hideout and were tailing him to catch other fish. He was warning us to cease all contact. I never found out what happened to him. I didn’t even know his name.’

  He lies there perfectly still. The sky is a cold, blue screen above, as if the clouds had been frightened away.

  ‘Maybe the Germans didn’t catch him. Maybe he got away.’

  His eyes stay up there in the sky; only his lips move.

  ‘I remember his features as if they were drawn on my mind.’

  The fact that he doesn’t look at me makes his words even more final. I hold on to the sides of the boat.

  ‘He saved my life, he saved the whole cell by cutting himself off. Yet he had almost zero chance of survival without us. How could he ask for anything with his English accent, how could he know who to trust? Without his contact in the Resistance, he was a dead man.’

  His voice dies out. I don’t say a thing. It feels like a trapdoor has slammed shut. When I look around again, I don’t recognise anything – not the lake, not the other boats, not the trees, not even the sunlight. He rows in and hops out, without a word. When I clamber up after him, nothing seems quite the same. The boat keeper, standing beside his painted hulls, stares at my father as he walks away. Trotting behind, I turn around and wave; he lifts his hand.

  Mr Crocodile has vanished from my mind.

  17

  THE MADEMOISELLES VIDELANGE

  Sometimes, my father turns up in the bedroom Sylvia and I share and walks me to school. With Sylvia, I usually take the bus. School is the Mademoiselles Videlange, two witches who stir their soup with their combs. They have an apartment-school in rue de Varenne with a sitting room full of benches and children. Even when I go with my father, I can’t help vomiting in dustbins all the way there. Before I leave, Sylvia warns: ‘It’s no use making a fuss. You’re no exception – every child has to go to school.’

  I know that. I’ve seen all the schoolbags and the navy-blue socks in the street. They’re caught in the child net that’s dragged across Paris. I notice the eyes of those who are desperate to escape. We recognise each other on opposite sidewalks, as we climb into different buses, as we are swallowed into different buildings – but we never meet, not once. In my bed at night, I beg myself not to be sick in the morning, but as soon as I wake up I start feeling queasy.

  It always begins after reaching the Alexandre III Bridge. My father doesn’t know how to clean me up with Quickies Cleansing Pads like Sylvia; he turns his eyes away and lets me manage on my own. After that, we’ve crossed the Rubicon: I have to go to school and he has to go to the office. We still have some time left, but it’s not the same anymore, now we’re on the Videlange side of the bridge, even if we walk around the sad little garden behind the Invalides or take the shortcut that takes longer by the rue Talleyrand. My father continues chatting about his past mistresses, my mother, anything to keep my mind off things.

  ‘Somebody told me I was bald the other day, but I am not bald, Catherine,’ he confides, as I shake my head. ‘No, I’m not bald, I’ve just got transparent hair. See?’ He bends his head to my level.

  But we haven’t arrived yet. We go and dawdle in the little park on the Esplanade des Invalides. There, under the chestnut trees, sometimes I even forget where I’m going.

  ‘Do you know what a water diviner is, Catherine?’

  He pretends to wait for my answer, even if we both know I don’t know. You can count on the Mademoiselles Videlange not saying a word about water diviners.

  ‘Well, I saw one last Sunday, just before I came back from the country. He walks around with a stick, quite an ordinary one, like that one – look, over there.’

  He shows me a fallen twig from a chestnut tree on the Esplanade where we are still dillydallying before taking the rue Talleyrand, which may delay our arrival by a few minutes.

  ‘As the diviner holds it down towards the ground, the stick starts wiggling in his hand to show him where the spring is. Then all they have to do is dig to find the water. Every countryman knows that.’

  I don’t need a stick to divine that he’s sad this morning. His step, his voice, his laugh are all trying too hard. He then holds me against him in a silence I know not to break, muttering to himself: ‘The army must get through.’

  He must be a bit desperate, because he adds under his breath: ‘I’ll have to burn my bridges.’

  This could means he’s in trouble and is going to take a risk. He pats my hand, including me in his own private conversation, resigning himself to the inevitable with a sigh: ‘It’s all part of the show.’

  But slowly his mood changes again and he puts his hands on my shoulders.

  ‘But I’ve got the baraka, Catherine!’

  That’s what he calls his luck.

  ‘Yes, it’s time to cross the Rubicon.’ Now he must have reached some inner decision in his mind.

  Suddenly, he hugs me. His normal state of excitement has returned. The dogs may bark, but, in the end, his caravan will pass, triumphant, overrunning every obstacle. He grabs my arm and stops dead in his tracks.

  ‘Did you know that I’m the sixth son in a row? In the country that makes you a marcou.’

  I ask what a marcou is. His eyes shine.

  ‘A marcou is a sorcerer, a healer. Look how warm my hand is.’

  He holds out his palm as if we were meeting for the first time.

  ‘See? Feel the current? If I wanted to, I could heal anyone.’

  When I ask him why he doesn’t, he stares at me in silence. You can almost see the thoughts running behind his eyes, like clouds behind a windowpane. Then surprisingly, he sighs and says: ‘I don’t know.’

  We are walking slower and slower. Now we’re in the tiny rue Talleyrand. All we have to do is go up the Boulevard des Invalides and then there’s no escaping it, we just have to get there – on the left sidewalk of the rue de Varenne, right in front of the Rodin Museum. The Rodin Museum is a very ugly building on the outside. The walls seem to be made of cardboard. One feels like cutting windows in them and changing the roof. I look at houses a lot. I’m sure a house can make you happy or unhappy. In my parents’ apartment, for example, the walls don’t speak the same language as the parquet floors. As we walk past, my father advises me to give Rodin’s house a good kick.

  ‘There, yes, kick it hard, Catherine. You know, Rodin had a pupil called Camille Claudel. But her sculptures were ten times more alive than his. He let her fall passionately in love with him and she became his mistress. Then he abandoned her and let her pompous brother, Paul Claudel, lock her up in an insane asylum without moving his little finger. The truth was that they were both jealous of her genius. Now she’s with Carpeaux
, another wonderful sculptor, in the basement of the Grand Palais on the other side of the Alexandre III Bridge. Those idiots let them rot there. I’ll take you to see them on Saturday morning.’

  I ask if we’ll meet Camille and Carpeaux.

  ‘No, only their sculptures – they’ve been dead a long time.’

  My father tells me about so many people that I have problems unravelling the living from the dead and the characters in his stories from the real ones he’s met. Our steps are winding down. The buildings stand stiffly behind their addresses. I’m sure that if a bomb exploded they wouldn’t budge an inch.

  ‘Teachers are imbeciles! Go on, give Rodin’s house another good kick.’

  Mademoiselle Videlange is a teacher, but I don’t remind him. It would only make him unhappy. The last of my porridge lands in the next dustbin. As we walk, my father is getting crosser and crosser with Rodin.

  ‘He had talent too, of course, but wait till you see Camille’s sculptures. Poor Camille Claudel – an insane asylum – one can’t imagine a worse fate. And now there she is, in the basement. Imbeciles.’

  I nod before vomiting my orange juice. We’re almost there. My father is holding my hand tightly and he’s not saying anything anymore. I know he would like me to escape the Mademoiselles Videlange. But there’s nothing he can do. It’s all part of the show, his fingers whisper to mine, the dogs may bark, but the caravan will pass …

  We’re now in front of the Videlanges’ building. We don’t take the lift. It’s too quick. We follow the red carpet clipped to the steps by golden bars. There is a big stain on one of them. He points at it.

  ‘Look at what you’ve done, Catherine. Why did you spoil the poor Videlanges’ carpet like that?’

  I rise to the bait indignantly, even if he’s only trying to distract me from what’s coming. It’s the last stretch of our journey, the last ditch. After that, we don’t say another word. I don’t even feel sick anymore; fear has replaced everything. Without looking at me, my father rings the bell. The tallest, skinniest and scariest Mademoiselle Videlange opens the door and bends forward to show us her rotten teeth. I turn to look at him one last time, but suddenly there’s no one else on the landing. My father has dived down the stairs two at a time. He has disappeared without looking back. He has vanished like a wizard.

  Mademoiselle Videlange and I are left staring at each other, listening to his steps tearing down the stairs that we had climbed so slowly. For an instant, we are alone on a desert island, as if she weren’t a real teacher, as if I weren’t a real child. Then her pointed fingers dig deep in the back of my blue coat and push me inside without a word. The smell of their dark apartment envelops me. The whole world becomes their horrible soup bubbling in their tiny, dark kitchen right near the front door, the window they never wash, the old abacus and the three long, narrow desks with their rows of ink holes and all the rows of wobbly sticks in the rows of notebooks.

  Driven by an invisible strength, she taps the face of her watch with her nail and makes the children trace impossibly straight sticks. We all seem to come at different hours but, as soon as we are inside, our heads are all bent at exactly the same angle as if we’d all been here for an eternity. When I slip into the empty space at the end of the bench, I can see the rows of knees like cabbages. I can hear the air coming in and out of all the lungs. I stare at my notebook. I take the pencil in my hand to start my own row of wobbly sticks. The two sisters speak very fast in French. I don’t understand a word. When they exchange glances, the air changes and twists in the room. I realise that they hate each other and that they are locked in here themselves, just like us.

  The strangest thing is that as soon as I am sitting in the Videlanges’ apartment, I also live in a world of sick relief – now it’s only a matter of wading through the hours on the wooden bench with the sudden barks of hard, shrill voices. The second Mademoiselle Videlange is as fat as the first one is thin, but they’re as nasty as each other. They never smile. They could do anything to us. They’re so frightening that none of the children exchange a glance. The terrified necks and backs breathe behind their closed door. If any of us met in the street by chance, we wouldn’t recognise each other. Our one concern is to draw sticks straight – mine always look drunk. I don’t understand why I must go to this place. I’ve been told that it’s to learn how to read but I still can’t read after four days and, when I open a real book, I don’t see a single stick.

  18

  BROTHERS

  Sylvia has gone to see her friend. I walk out of the precinct of our room and creep into my father’s library. Female voices float down from my mother’s bedroom. Alexandre, at the bottom of the stairs, is shouting encouragements. When he sees me he whispers that she’s going to see her Nounou, a woman we both detest – even if we never say it out loud. We look at each other wordlessly. We don’t need words. This Nounou, who brought her up, is an old woman straight out of a fairytale, only meaner and crueller than the witch. She’s an evil person who peppers the spiteful things she says with constant allusions to the Holy Virgin. Yet my father mysteriously understands my mother’s adoration, her mesmerised incantations to her, as if they were all part of some necessary ritual. Poum approaches her Nounou as Chinese courtiers approached their emperor, as Mongols approached Genghis Khan. Suddenly, Alexandre smiles down at me and goes back to his table. I slide next to him on a little stool with twirly legs.

  I think of my mother closeted up there. To see her pack is an excruciating spectacle. Her underwear in satin pockets and her clothes, perfectly folded by someone else, are tentatively laid inside. Her powder, her books, her glasses stand on the edge like helpless sentinels. But always, just before closing the suitcase, she rips the lot out and everything lands higgledy-piggledy on the bed. The whole process must start from scratch. Later on, reading The Grapes of Wrath, or seeing a crowd of refugees, I will be reminded of my mother’s packing. The maid of the time, Maria, is a very attractive dark-haired Spanish girl. She speaks very little, seems to despise Poum and to like my father very much. Blissfully unaware, Poum murmurs to herself when she glances at Maria: ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’

  Sometimes Poum comes down the stairs, stands in front of Alexandre’s desk, her palms pressed flat on the wood. A bit like an athlete, she bends over, takes a deep breath, then stares at him wildly and runs up the stairs again. My father, instead of trying to dissuade her, nods gravely, as if this were an unavoidable catastrophe, an ineluctable ukase. He waves at her retreating back and blows her a kiss when she turns around at the top.

  Then she’s gone, without a tear, like a soldier to war. Until the taxi swallows her, my father waves frantically out of the window, then closes it as carefully as the lid of a sarcophagus. He turns round and his humour changes. This is the first time we are quite alone in the house. Unobtrusively, his sole presence pervades the air of every empty room. We could be in a Roman camp, on a boat at sea, in a desert, far beyond French people, aunts, grandmothers and Nounous.

  He flings himself into his reclining velvet chair and whips me up in the crook of his arm. It’s like settling against a whale. He reads me The Lion by Joseph Kessel out loud. The lion is my favourite character in the book, so we jump to the places where the lion is. Then he bounces out of his armchair to go and brush his teeth. There’s no transition, no ritual attached to his next activity. It springs out of nowhere. I sit on the edge of the bathtub and watch him. He doesn’t say a word during the whole operation. After a few trips back and forth across his teeth, the toothbrush flies into the glass. Flashing movements blend into each other. The shaving brush, the razor and his cheeks have become a frothy cloud with his hands flying in and out like Spitfires. The next second, his face is buried in a towel and he’s wiping it without even a rinse. The towel lands on the rack like Snow White’s duster in the Seven Dwarfs’ home. It mustn’t make it every time, but he’s already out of the bathroom before he can find out.

  First we go to the Champs
Élysées. It’s a holiday and there is not one person abroad from the place de la Concorde right up to the Étoile.

  ‘Look! Paris is ours!’

  And before I can say ‘Jack Robinson’, as Sylvia does, the sun is pouring on his open face and he’s lying full length in the middle of the avenue with his arms wide open. I settle in the crook of one of them and we both enjoy the strange privacy of the vast open space.

  ‘So many people have marched down here, and now, look, it’s just the two of us!’

  Then he takes me to Thoiry, a zoo outside of Paris where animals walk around quite free, because he wants to show me Kessel’s lion and neither of us can bear to see it locked in a cage. There are a lot of people waiting to buy a ticket. He grabs my hand and overtakes a dozen nuns.

  ‘We’re covered by the AAA! You’ll see. They won’t mind!’

  As soon as my father breaks the rules, he talks about the AAA (Anti-Aircraft Artillery). He’s right, though – they don’t notice anything as he smoothly bypasses the whole talking black-and-white phalanx of robes and wimples. Once we are in, we only see camels. There’s a lion but she’s with her cubs and has no mane, so we are quite sure she’s not the one we are looking for. I try to hide my disappointment. My father squeezes my hand because he’s disappointed too. He runs to the car and we fly away from the zoo.

  On the way back, he tells me about the bombing of London during the war, even though he wasn’t in London at the time, but in Paris with the German boots on the cobblestones.

  ‘The English were very brave,’ he announces. ‘They stuck it out on their island, all alone. When everyone else had given up, they held on.’

  I nod approvingly. Sylvia is English. I was born in London. I’m English. I have an English passport. England is home for me, much more than Paris. Even our bedroom is a kind of stranded England. Sometimes I feel Sylvia and I are hiding in Paris, hiding in their apartment, as if, for us, the Resistance were still going on.