I found out almost by accident, while we were having dinner with friends and talking about the atomic tests France was carrying out in Algeria. When he said it in passing, I was in Hiroshima, I was dumbstruck. The first thing I pictured, feeling like a complete idiot, were the scars on his back and arms. Supposedly acquired when, as a child, he scalded himself with boiling water while his mother was cooking. I had to run to the bathroom to throw up. And I couldn’t utter another word through the rest of the dinner. He kept looking at me with a mixture of remorse and coldness. As if to say, If that hurt you, I was hurt a whole lot more.
After the obligatory exclamations and a few well-meaning remarks, our friends tried to pick up the conversation with apparent normality. It was their way of digesting (or not digesting) such a revelation. Or perhaps they simply assumed that I had known all about it.
All I could do was stub out cigarettes and terrify myself in silence. How could he have concealed something like that from me? What kind of man was I sharing my life with, someone who hadn’t wanted to tell me the most important thing about his? What did this change? How, and how much, did it change us?
As soon as we were alone we had a huge fight and a magical reconciliation. I cried a lot and then we cried together, which was the best part. In fact, there were two reasons I cried. Because of the horrifying story he was telling me, which he would never repeat. But also because until that moment I hadn’t deserved his trust.
Yoshie explained he had absolutely no wish to reduce his identity to that tragedy. If he’d told me about it before, it would have colored our entire relationship. And that he refused to live, and also to love, as a victim in other people’s eyes. He’d suffered too much in the past, he said, to sacrifice his future. If he felt healthy, with the necessary strength and desire to live his youth, why should he present himself to everyone as a perpetual cripple, as someone incapable of rebuilding his own life?
It went without saying, he insisted, that he admired the people who had decided to speak or write about their tragedies, leaving a testimony of what had occurred. But, he asked me, didn’t I think it unfair to denigrate those who had managed to put the ordeal behind them? All those who had struggled to escape the pain and start anew.
I found his arguments very convincing. I came to the conclusion that they deserved not only the utmost respect, but also my praise. That his refusal to speak about his experiences showed a kind of dignity and fortitude. Who could know better than he, than the victim himself, what the most appropriate response was?
After that night, we scarcely touched on the subject. I decided there were no more secrets. That, knowing what I knew then, there could be no more barriers. I confess that now our silence strikes me as odd. I wonder whether neither of us really got over it. Whether perhaps he didn’t dare speak, and I was afraid to ask.
Even so, I remember there were occasional hints. We were taking a stroll through the upper part of Montmartre. The sky was clear. It was summer. He raised his head, and paused. He squeezed my arm very tight. And he told me that shooting stars frightened him. Taken aback, I asked him why. He said they resembled other things that cross the sky before they fall on you.
* * *
Around that time, people started talking about the hibakusha. It seems many of them were reluctant to speak with the media or to participate in public events. Yoshie considered big speeches the concern of politicians. For him, respecting people’s memory was a private affair. Honoring the dead with the silence of the dead.
Politics didn’t help people speak either. The bombs and the bombed were scarcely mentioned in Japan. There had been no general condemnation, more like an embarrassed murmur. Indeed, many victims kept quiet, even after they got sick. Unfortunately, Yoshie didn’t tell me any of this. I read about it much later. Too late.
To be fair, in France we had our own postwar silence. Despite the obvious differences, I remembered how a lot of people felt awkward speaking about our collaboration with the Nazis. For a long time there was a debate (is there still one?) about the need to remember it, or whether to look toward the future, which nowadays is the official euphemism for forgetting.
The books that most interested me at the fac were the ones about the Vichy regime, which was given the despicable name État Français. I was a child still learning to write when Paris fell. In theory, the armistice with the Nazis was supposed to prevent an even worse agreement. Which suggests, alas, that peace and war are just two stages in the same negotiation. I heard Yoshie say something similar.
The conditions we agreed to, and their consequences, could hardly have been worse. We had to place our police at the service of the gestapo and the SS. To help them suppress (can there be any greater treachery?) the French Resistance. To spread propaganda against foreigners. To cooperate actively in the Holocaust. And to abduct ten thousand Jews in a single day in that Vél d’Hiv roundup, which my children don’t remember, and for which the Le Pen family apparently doesn’t hold France accountable. In a word: peace.
Comparing this to the Japanese empire, it occurs to me that our regime chose the opposite horror. It humiliated itself to maintain the fiction of the state. Its shell. The seat of government was transferred to Vichy. That doesn’t surprise me. A typical French provincial town. Tourism, thermal waters, bijou hotels. Bon goût. Europeanness.
Only a few months before the atom bombs, the German village to which the Vichy cabinet had fled was taken by the Americans. And by Free French troops. If there’d been no authority here supporting them until the end, would the Germans have surrendered more quickly? What about the Japanese empire? Would the war have ended a bit sooner? Enough for them not to drop the bombs? Those are questions I never put to Yoshie.
The ending was, let’s say, very French. Laval shot. Marshal Pétain condemned to death. De Gaulle commuted his sentence (respect for life, above all, ladies and gentlemen!), and his followers were sanctioned. Among them Schuman, the father of what we like to call the European Union.
As far as I know, Schuman managed to avoid cooperating with either the Nazis or the Resistance. Perhaps that explains why he became justice minister. I remember it well, because I was reading newspapers by then. I hear that Monsieur Schuman’s beatification is underway. We can never have too many monuments. And what did we do with the Vél d’Hiv? We knocked it down, naturally.
It was soon after the demolition of the velodrome that we started nuclear weapons testing in Algeria. My friends and I mostly agreed to condemn it. But when the Soviet Union resumed its nuclear experiments it was a different story. A lot of my ex–fellow students chose to defend it. I was sensitized to the subject through Yoshie. Not because of what he said about it, which was virtually nothing, but because of what I knew about him and the secret he had revealed to me.
In my view, it made no difference whether it was capitalists or socialists who made the atom bombs. My friends accused me of being simplistic and not fully committed. You can’t casually compare two systems that are incomparable, they protested.
How is it possible that our deepest convictions end up seeming nothing more than a sign of the times, a generational trend? Do we all treat the past frivolously? Or aren’t we clear-sighted enough to see our era with the clarity of the following generations?
Many of us university students identified with Castroism. Yoshie didn’t seem so convinced. If I remember correctly, his objections had to do with the fact that Cuba’s leaders were military men. My friends and I felt this was inevitable considering the situation of the island, and even desirable, because that way the triumphs of the revolution could be better defended from imperialist aggression. My fellow students viewed pacifism as a form of collaboration with the enemy. They didn’t see all weapons as equal. And using them to oppress or to liberate wasn’t the same thing either. Maybe that’s why the men of my generation felt so removed from the flower power of the next decade. To my granddaughter, Colette, the sixties are the best. Then again, who really understands hi
story?
Incidentally, a friend from that group of students ended up as mayor of a small town in Provence. She’s also a militant lesbian, which she wasn’t in our youth. Well, the militant part, yes. For years the French nuclear missile silos were situated in that region, in Plateau d’Albion. If I’m not mistaken, France still has the most missiles in the world after America and Russia. All to prevent worse wars, of course, our intentions are always altruistic. To broker total disarmament would be naïve. An idea that could come only from women.
When the area ceased to be used as a base, my friend Aude started working with local people to transform it into a solar energy plant. That, to me, is far more patriotic than all the other stuff. They say our nuclear energy industry is bankrupt. That we intervened in Mali to protect our supplies of uranium. And that at this rate we’ll be forced to buy electricity from the British, who continue to invest in nuclear power plants.
My friend Aude is no longer mayor, we’re too old for that kind of nonsense. But she still campaigns on environmental issues and the rights of the LGBTQ community. She is constantly posting things on Facebook. If Facebook had been around when we were students, I wonder how we would have passed our exams. You end up chatting with complete strangers, from countries you’ve never been to, which is what happened to me with a friendly young journalist from some newspaper in Argentina. He told me that if he ever comes to Paris, he’d like to interview me in person. The other night I stayed up chatting with him online until two in the morning. My husband thought he was an ex-lover. Good.
Honestly, this habit of calling them LGBTQ sounds like a euphemism to me. But that’s how Aude always writes it. Oh, Violet, don’t be so vieux jeu, she tells me. Well, if I was such a fuddy-duddy, I wouldn’t like all those photos she posts.
* * *
As for sex, well, that’s another matter. I remember very clearly what it was like with my first boyfriend, Olivier. Such a handsome young man. Sometimes I think more about him than I do my own husband.
I lost my virginity to Olivier, possibly a little sooner than I should have. It’s one thing to start sleeping with someone, and quite another to learn to enjoy your own pleasure. I had no real urge to have sex. It was simply that his desire to make love was stronger than my desire not to. Realizing this was far more important to me than the act itself. It was the first time I sensed that a couple consists of a conciliation of desires. A constant (and occasionally delicious) process in which the strongest desire ends up imposing itself.
I was in love with my boyfriend. And yet, how can I put this, I wasn’t in love with his desire for me. My experiences with the handsome Olivier were all very much the same. A swift foreplay routine, during which I tried to appear passionate, without really knowing how. It began with his desire imposing itself on my lack of desire. Followed by a feeling of lethargy, a bit like when you’ve just woken up, which slowly transformed into vague interest. That interest slowly aroused a wish to feel something special. Then came a semblance of pleasure. The start of something possibly intense, all too soon interrupted by his ecstasy, that premature, and for me inexplicable, ecstasy. Then a slight feeling of annoyance. With, to top it all off, the apparent obligation to display satisfaction and affection. And in the end, less enthusiasm for a next time. It never crossed my mind that we were both to blame for this.
Then I met Yoshie, who wasn’t as handsome but who had a certain something. To begin with, when he escorted me home, we would stay in the entrance, unable to part. We’d seek out the darkest corner possible. Whenever we heard the elevator we’d freeze, trying hard not to giggle. Whispering to each other, and doing, well, a few other things. I was beginning to want him to suggest we sleep together and I felt a mixture of desire and wounded pride. Wasn’t he supposed to find me attractive?
Yoshie wasn’t sure whether to be shocked or delighted at the ease with which people here, in his view, went to bed with someone they liked. Delaying that moment was for him a way of committing to the other person. Although I didn’t dare contradict him for fear of seeming loose, the opposite argument occurred to me. That being more impulsive could also be a sign of trust, of giving oneself. I was unsettled by my new boyfriend’s restraint, and I confused it with sophistication. I thought he was behaving like an homme fatal. Ideal for a young cinephile. Compared with him, the boys from my own country seemed so coarse. It was always obvious what they were after. And that prompted me not to let them have it.
I’m sure that Yoshie was still a virgin, although he never admitted it. In any case, I can see that the waiting made the consummation a tremendous event. As if my true virginity, the second one, the one I now truly wanted to lose, was in his hands. I don’t know whether as a strategy or out of sheer panic, Yoshie seemed to ritualize every erotic approach. This allowed me to take my time caressing, to enjoy the sense of progression. In the end, of course, I was the one who took the initiative. I tried to appear as inexperienced as possible, so that he wouldn’t feel intimidated. I suspect I wasn’t very successful.
I won’t describe the first time, when everything to be expected happened. Although I also felt some surprising sensations, which encouraged me to persevere. And I have to admit that it soon started to pay off. We changed gear, became emboldened. In that sense, the way we progressed took me by surprise.
During those early days, we walked the streets guarding a secret. We felt we had crossed an invisible but decisive line. One that separated the confusion of adolescence from that other clear-cut, dangerously tangible world that previously had seemed beyond our reach. We constantly yearned to spend the night together. I would make up all kinds of excuses, tell my parents the most elaborate (and no doubt implausible) lies in order to sleep at Yoshie’s loft. By now, I can picture my father guessing my true intentions, and my mother intervening every time I invented some party, or a girlfriend, or a late-night study session so I could sleep over.
Or rather, not sleep. Sexual excitement wasn’t the only reason. There was also that strange energy, that stream of insomnia that prevented me from closing my eyes as the night wore on and he lay next to me breathing deeply. I listened closely for every noise coming from his chest, as if it were an engine. My euphoria was so great that it seemed wasteful to go several hours without thinking about us, without being fully aware of his physical proximity.
Yoshie’s attic apartment was near Gare du Nord. Tiny. Cheap. Dark. With an impossible staircase. Paradise. I remember one winter night, we had just seen a movie by Agnès Varda. No, Chabrol. About two cousins who live together. One of them is always partying and passes his exams. The other studies all day and flunks out. I think I really liked it, and Yoshie not so much. Later, Chabrol’s films became so silly, but his early ones were interesting. Or is it me who changed?
The point is, we were leaving the theater, and Yoshie’s friend, who had come from Tokyo to do some sightseeing, was staying at his loft. It was impossible for us to go to my house and shut ourselves away in my bedroom, or even stay up talking in the living room until midnight, not with my parents and my jealous sister there. My father had subjected the last boyfriend I brought home to a kind of cultural and financial interrogation. All through dinner, he insisted he must reread Balzac, whom I doubt Olivier knew except by name. He concluded with his usual joke: When I was young, Balzac provided the answer to all my worries. It’s different now. Not just because you young people are incapable of understanding Balzac, but because you have no worries! My boyfriend couldn’t get away fast enough, and my mother murmured, He seems like a nice boy. He never came over for dinner again.
And so Yoshie and I decided, if just that once, to pool all the money we had left and allow ourselves the luxury of a night at a hostel. We ended up choosing a really awful place in the Latin Quarter. Which, incredible as it now seems, was an affordable neighborhood in those days. I can still recall—how is that possible?—the battered sign on the door: HÔTEL DE LA PAIX—TOUT CONFORT. The only thing we asked, besides the price, was
whether the room had a bathtub. Our big fantasy had always been to take a long bath together, because in Yoshie’s chambre de bonne there was only a very basic washroom.
We ran up the stairs as fast as we could. We were laughing and gasping for breath when we opened the door. We went in, didn’t even look around. We didn’t inspect everything, the way you do in hotels nowadays, with a look on your face like someone handing out one- to five-star ratings. As soon as we closed the door, despite the icy draft filtering through the window glass, we threw off our clothes, kissed frantically, and stumbled toward the bathroom. There we discovered, exactly as they’d said, an old bathtub. There was just one problem. No bath plug.
With the same intensity with which I had climbed the stairs, in that exaggerated way one experiences things at twenty, I reacted as though the absence of the plug were a disaster. My disappointment was immense and I felt the whole of winter on my back. Fortunately, Yoshie had an idea that proved to be far sexier than a bit of plastic. He went into the bedroom. He crouched, naked and covered in goose bumps, and inspected my tangled clothes. He did something with them that I couldn’t make out properly, and came back to the bathroom carrying my black stockings. He tied a knot in them, then pressed them into the drain until it was plugged. He turned on the hot tap and we embraced, dying of cold and happiness.
Actually, I was the only one who shivered that night. That’s something that always amazed me about him, he never seemed cold, not even on the bitterest days in his loft. Winter wasn’t his problem. I, on the other hand, was constantly asking him for another blanket. And yet I loved that extreme cold. It taught me how to feel each movement. Forced us to be one another’s energy.
Even back then I always dressed warmly. My children tease me, they say I can feel a draft before it arrives. I can’t help it if the world has become an air-conditioned madhouse. Can anyone tell me which lowlife gave the order to turn summers into artificial winters? Curiously enough, when summer came, Yoshie never seemed hot either.
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