Shhh Read online

  Well, I’ll keep trying in spite of myself.

  I remained in that dark hole from 5:30 in the morning until the next morning when finally I dared come out just as the sun was rising.

  The reason I didn’t dare come out was because the people who lived on the main floor of our building could have caught me and taken me to the police.

  They didn’t like Jews. They were the ones who had denounced us when the Vichy government ordered all the Jews to declare themselves and their possessions.

  I still have the official document my father received on September 7, 1941, from Monsieur Le Procureur de la République ordering him to appear before Le Tribunal de Première Instance to declare his Jewish identity and the state of his belongings. I found that document among old papers left behind in our apartment when I returned to Montrouge at the end of the war.

  Because we lived in a suburb where there were not too many Jews, my father had decided not to declare us. But that didn’t last long. The people in our building denounced us and after that we were forced, my parents, sisters and I, to wear the yellow star on all our clothes.

  I should perhaps insert here the poem I wrote that describes the day my mother sewed the yellow star on my coat and my school uniform.

  Yes, I’m going to ...

  Federman, now you are going too far. You’re not going to start shoving poems in the middle of your stories as you did in your other books. I’m sure that every time your readers come to one of these poems, they skip over it. And besides, your publisher is going to complain and tell you that poetry doesn’t sell any more.

  Well, I’ll tell him that personally I make no distinction when I write between poetry and prose. And that sometimes I manage to say better what I want to say in a short poem of a few lines than with two or three pages of prose. And besides that saves paper. It’s not a blockbuster I want to write here. Just the story of my childhood.

  So I’ll put that poem here. And hell with it.

  Yellow Humiliation

  my mother wept

  quietly

  that cold winter day

  while she sewed

  on all our clothes

  the yellow humiliation

  s he said

  her eyes dry now

  as she straightened

  on my shoulders

  the soiled coat

  I wore to school

  just let your scarf

  hang over it

  this way

  nobody will notice

  When the police opened the front gate of our building and entered the courtyard they called out, Federman! And the people on the main floor opened their window and shouted, Third floor on the left!

  Still half asleep in my bed, I saw my father and my mother rush to the window. Papa was in his pyjamas, and Maman in her nightgown. They didn’t say anything, but they understood what was going on. That’s when my mother pulled me out of my bed, shoved my clothes into my arms, and pushed me into the closet on the landing of the staircase.

  Later I heard my parents and sisters go down the stairs with their little nomad bundles. I even heard the creaking of the gate as the police closed it, and I heard the sound of the truck’s motor as it started.

  That’s when the story of my parents and sisters stopped. That’s all I know of their story. I know nothing of what happened to them after ... after they ... I was going to say, abandoned me.

  No, they did not abandon me. They hid me in that little box to preserve me. As one preserves something precious. The story of my parents and sisters closed with my mother’s shhh. The title I have given to this book, and probably it’s final word, if ever I reach the end of this story.

  I know nothing of what happened to Simon, Marguerite, Sarah, and Jacqueline Federman, after the police truck left. Except the end. Yes, I know the end of their story. I know that they died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Auschwitz that fucking word. I have the documents that were painstakingly recorded and prove where and when they died.

  You see, I even know with which convoy they left for Auschwitz. I did some research after the war. I obtained the official documents. I still have them.

  According to these documents, they were deported separately on different dates.

  My mother was deported first. She left from Pithiviers in convoy 14, wagon 16, on August 3rd, 1942. Eighteen days after she was arrested.

  The documents specify that upon arrival at Auschwitz, on August 5th, of 52 men 22 were selected for work and received the numbers 56411 to 56432. 542 women were also selected and were given the numbers 15102 to 15267 and 15269 to 15644.

  482 women were gassed upon arrival.

  I don’t know if my mother was among those who were selected. There were only 4 survivors of this convoy when Auschwitz was liberated in April 1945. My mother was not one of the survivors. But perhaps she managed to survive for a while. Even though she was not very tall, she was very strong. That’s because of the hard work she did cleaning other people’s houses and doing their laundry at the public lavoir de Montrouge.

  My two sisters were deported together from Drancy in convoy 21, wagon 2, on August 19, 1942. They were immediately exterminated upon their arrival at Auschwitz. That’s what the documents state. Except that, on these documents, the age of my sister Jacqueline is given erroneously. Jacqueline was not 15 when she was deported. She was only 12. I want to rectify that.

  And yet, all my life, I have often dreamt that one of my sisters had survived, and that one day, by chance, we would find each other.

  An old dream-cliché that many survivors have lugged hopelessly in their heads all their lives.

  My father left Drancy in convoy 24, on August 28. He was immediately exterminated upon his arrival at Auschwitz. He had tuberculosis. One of his lungs had been removed. He spat blood all the time. I will tell later what it meant to live with a tubercular father, with a ...

  Federman, if you continue like this, you’ll sink into Zolaesque miserabilism.

  I don’t care. I have to tell the truth, even if the truth hurts. Yes, I know what my readers will say.

  It’s not a novel you’re writing Federman, it’s just plain straightforward autobiographical writing. Or worse, what the French call autofiction.

  Well, I’ll tell them that they are mistaken. What I’m writing is pure fiction, because, you see, I’ve forgotten my entire childhood. It has been blocked in me. So I’ve to reinvent it, reconstruct it. And besides, as Mallarmé once put it, All that is written is fictive.

  The blocks of words that I’m accumulating on the pages are like the bricks that are used to build a house. I’m in the process of building my childhood with these blocks of words.

  So I’m going to continue accumulating, and we’ll see where that’ll take us.

  As I was saying, before being interrupted, I know nothing of what happened between my mother’s last word to me and her last breath.

  I know nothing that happened to my father and my sisters, out there, in the East. I don’t know how much they suffered, how hungry they were, if they were beaten, if they were cold, if they were frightened, if they saw each other, if my sisters were raped before being exterminated.

  Well, everything has been told and retold about those who died in the camps. But all this has nothing to do with the story of my parents and sisters. All this is History, but not their story.

  Their story? What happened after they were taken away? Nobody knows. No one can tell that story. Not even me. Except perhaps with ready-made sentences. Clichés. The story of my parents and sisters stopped when they went down the staircase. From that moment on they became absences. They were erased from history: X-X-X-X

  But my story, I can tell it. The story of the thirteen years I spent with my parents and my sisters. My childhood.

  That’s what I’m going to try to tell now. And perhaps, while relating my childhood, I will also tell a bit of their story. Well, the beginning, until that moment when their story stopped. This way
I’ll have the beginning and the end, but nothing in the middle.

  My mother was 39 years old when her story stopped. My father 37. He was two years younger. My sister Sarah was 15, Jacqueline 12.

  I suppose I can say that 1942 was the year of their death. But I can also say that 1942 was the year of my rebirth. Or rather my real birth, because when my mother hid me in the closet she gave me an excess of life. And so now, more than sixty years later, I want to tell the story of my childhood. Well, I’m going to try to tell it. I’m ...

  Federman, stop repeating that you’re going to tell your childhood, and start telling it. You’re not going to use the same old leap-frog technique again in this story—delaying and digressing all over the place.

  What do you think? That I’m going to tell this story straightforward? That would be something. I’ve said it and repeated it many times: chronology handicaps me. I don’t know how to walk the straight line. And I don’t understand logic at all.

  Besides, what’s left of my childhood in my head are only fragments, debris, torn souvenirs for which I must now improvise a form.

  OK, I’ll try to tell it anyway.

  This lost childhood blocked in me, except for the vague debris of souvenirs, how should it be told? How can it be found again? How to reconstruct it? Where to begin?

  As I did in the preceding pages, I had to return to the closet. It is from there, from that black hole, that the story of my childhood can be told. Backward. Or at least obliquely.

  But this time, instead of coming out of the closet on tip-toes, full of fear, and with a package of shit in my hands, instead of going down the stairs slowly and quietly trying to avoid the creaking steps, until the little boy that I was then started running into the street towards the enigma of his future, this time I’ll come out of the closet without fear, and I’ll go down the stairs resolutely to better sink into my childhood.

  To better fall back into childhood, if at all possible.

  To find this childhood, it was necessary to revisit the closet, and tell, once and for all, what happened later on that July day of 1942. How during the long hours the boy spent in the dark, groping at the walls with his hands, searching blindly in all the corners, he found behind a pile of old newspapers a box of sugar cubes, probably bought on the black market.

  Seated on the pile of newspapers, the boy sucked pieces of sugar one after another to calm his hunger and his fear. But his fear made him want to shit. So he opened a newspaper, spread it on the floor, and crouched like an animal, holding his penis with two fingers not to wet himself, he defecated on the photos of smiling German soldiers, then he folded the newspaper into a neat package feeling the warmth and the wetness on his hands. He placed the dirty package next to the door, and the next morning, when he finally dared come out of the closet, he climbed up the ladder that led to the skylight, pushed it open, and left his bundle of excrement on the roof of the building.

  Three years later, after the war, when I returned to the old house in Montrouge for the first time, I immediately went up to the skylight to see if my package of shit was still on the roof. I found nothing. Had the wind blown away my fear? Had the rain washed it away? Had the birds pecked my shitty package? One will never know. But that day I burst into laughter while asking myself these questions.

  In any case, this time, it is not on tip-toes and with shit in my hands that I will emerge from the black hole. It is backward, without fear, that I will plunge into my childhood and try to imagine it.

  It is true that over the years I have managed to tell, here and there, moments of that childhood—little stories, scenes dispersed in my books. I suppose now I should recycle these fragments of writing. They will help me reconstruct my childhood, they ...

  Federman, you’re incurable. You’re not going to start reusing your old stuff. Plagiarizing yourself? Mumble the same old stories again?

  Why not? After all, what I’m in the process of telling is the final chapter of the great story I’ve been muttering and scribbling for the past forty years. It’s a piece of the whole. Of the big book I’m trying to finish now. It’s the conclusion, even though that conclusion is my beginning. So I think I can allow myself to re-inscribe here some of the stories I’ve already told.

  And after that, when I’m finished, finished with the big book, if there is still time, then I’ll tell a different story. Maybe a science-fiction story. I’ve always wanted to write a funny sexy science-fiction novel in the style of Stanislav Lem.

  But for the time being, and for the commodity and acceleration of the tale that I am in the process of telling, I think I can allow myself displaced words I’ve scribbled elsewhere. After all, it’s part of the same story.

  To begin, I have to draw the geography of the neighborhood where I spent the first thirteen years of my life, in Montrouge. A proletarian suburb, south of Paris.

  First, the apartment building, 4 Rue Louis Rolland. Then the street where I played with my sisters, my cousin Salomon, and the other boys of the neighborhood. Then the adjacent streets. The boys school where I went, Rue de Bagneux. The bakery where I bought the bread and where on Sunday, if my mother had the money, I would take the chicken she had bought at the market to be roasted in the baker’s oven. The meat shop, Avenue Émile Zola, and also the horse meat shop on the same avenue, and all the other shops on Rue Michelet. The open market where on Sundays I went with my mother to buy fresh vegetables, and other things. I was the one who carried le filet. The café Chez Marius at the corner of Rue Louis Rolland and la Route d’Orléans, next to the patisserie. Oh, and very importantly, the big factory across the street from our building. A tannery from which an unbearable smell emanated at all times. People who came to our neighborhood always said, Wow does it stink here!

  I spent my entire childhood in that smelly neighborhood, totally oblivious to what was going on in the world. Oh well, I must describe it anyway.

  Now the house where we lived. It was a three-story building, with a courtyard in front enclosed by walls on each side and a tall gate that opened onto the street. I vaguely remember the gate was painted green. It was an old dilapidated 19th-century building, like all the others on that street, except for one house. An elegant villa. I’ll tell about it later.

  I’ve been told that originally all the houses on our street were military barracks. They all looked exactly the same. But now many have been renovated and modernized.

  (Montrouge has become un quartier chic pour nouveaux riches. I don’t think I need to translate that.)

  The staircase of the house was narrow and dark. Some of the steps were rotten and creaked. There was always a rancid smell in the staircase. The building had a very deep and scary cellar where the coal was stored, and other junk. At the top of the staircase, on the third floor, a ladder led to a little glass transom window that opened onto the roof.

  The building belonged to my uncle Leon and my aunt Marie. Marie was my mother’s older sister. My mother had two brothers and five sisters. I’ll tell more about them later.

  Leon and Marie were rich. They owned several apartment buildings in Paris. But I never knew where.

  On the main floor of our building there were two small apartments. One on each side of the staircase. Each had only one room and a small kitchen. No bathroom. This is where the anti-Semites lived. We never spoke to them.

  Leon had tried to get rid of them, but I think there was a law that prevented proprietors from expelling undesirable tenants.

  The entire second floor was Leon and Marie’s apartment. They had a dining room, a salon, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and even a bathroom. They had lots of antique furniture in their apartment. Oriental carpets. Two big buffets. Armchairs. A tall grandfather clock. Paintings on the walls, and all kinds of little knickknacks on the tables, most of them in carved ivory.

  Ivory statues were in style before the war. Most of these statues were of wild African animals, all the same size, elephants, giraffes, lions, monkeys, gazelles. I was not allowed
to touch these little statues, but I would spend a lot of time just looking at them whenever I went to Leon and Marie’s apartment. These wild animals made me dream, and even believe, that I was in Africa chasing lions, wandering in the jungle, dying of malaria. These little animal statues made me invent stories in which I saw myself as a great adventurer.

  In the dining room there were two giant Chinese vases, one on each side of the fireplace. Leon and Marie had a fireplace. In our apartment we only had a small stove, a salamander-stove in which we burned coal in the winter when my mother could afford to buy some. Sometimes, when it was very cold in the winter, my mother would beg Leon for a little coal. Later I’ll tell how poor we were.

  On the Chinese vases there were pictures of dragons. These dragons made me invent other wild adventures in far away places. Chinese vases were in style before the war. They must have been expensive, but even though Leon was known in the family as un radin, a miser, he liked to accumulate objects. Oh, they also had a phonograph, a big radio, and a piano.

  My cousin Marco, their only son, took piano lessons. His real name was Salomon, but during the war he changed it to Marco, and for the rest of his life he was known only by that name. He was four years older than me. He made my life miserable when we were growing up together. I’ll tell some of the mean things he did to me, and the ugly thing he once wanted me to do to him.

  In my uncle and aunt’s bedroom there was a huge armoire with a mirror in the center, and a bed with a big red feather quilt. My uncle Leon would hide money under the mattress. I know this because one time, when I was still very young, I saw him slide his hand under the mattress and take out a handful of large bills. He didn’t notice I saw him.