Shhh Page 3

  The wooden floor of their apartment was always well polished. They had une femme de ménage who came once a week to polish the floor and the furniture. When you entered their apartment, you had to put your feet on little pieces of cloth and slide along on the shiny and slippery parquet. It was like a game for me. As if I were ice-skating. Leon would get angry and yell at me if I walked on the floor with my shoes because I neglected to put my feet on the little patins.

  In the salon there was a leather divan with big cushions and one armchair. And also a tall oval mirror on a swiveling stand. My uncle Leon was a tailor. His atelier was downstairs in the courtyard, but he did the fitting of his clients in that salon. This way the clients could see in the mirror the suits they were trying on, and Leon could show them where he was going to adjust the pants or the jacket.

  Next to the mirror stood a mannikin. Just a bust on top of a metal stem. No head. On this bust Leon put the jackets he had prepared for the fittings. The jackets still had the white basting threads all over, showing that they were not finished and could be altered if necessary. After the fittings, when the jackets were finished, I was the one who had to remove these white threads with a little scissors. I had to be very careful not to cut the fabric because, for sure, Leon would have killed me.

  Leon had a good reputation as a tailor. Everybody in the family said that he had some very wealthy clients who came all the way to Montrouge just to have a suit made by Léon le Tailleur, as he was known by everyone. Some of the rich clients even came by car with a chauffeur.

  My aunt Marie worked with Leon in the atelier. She did all the sewing to be done by hand, and many other things, as she sat on a little tabouret in front a table full of pins and needles and scissors and things she needed to do her work. Leon did the cutting of the fabric, standing in front of a tall table. He did the sewing with a foot pedal sewing machine. He also did the final pressing with a big steam iron, and the fittings with the clients.

  I know all this because I spent a lot of time in their atelier doing little chores. After I finished my homework, Leon always made me do little chores instead of letting me go play in the street with the other boys. My cousin Salomon was allowed to go play in the street when he finished his homework, but not me, unless I could sneak past the window of the atelier without Leon seeing me. To go out into the street one had to pass in front of the atelier, and when Leon saw me through the window he would call out to me loud to come in and make me do something.

  Humiliating little chores, like pulling the white threads from the jackets, or on my knees picking up with a little magnet the pins and needles that had fallen between the cracks of the floor planks. He kept telling me that a little cornichon like me should learn how to work. That’s what he always called me, cornichon. A pickle, that’s what the French call a dumb person.

  Because I was so shy when I was a boy, and always daydreaming, everyone in the family thought I was mentally retarded. I never said anything. I think I was five years old when I started talking.

  When someone asked me a question, I would either shrug my shoulders or shake my head as an answer. Even my mother used to say, toujours dans la lune mon pauvre garçon. On top of that, my nose was dripping all the time, I was undernourished, knock-kneed, and scared of everything, especially rats. Quite frankly there wasn’t much hope for me. And my uncle Leon took advantage of that.

  Sometimes, when my mother didn’t have money to buy food for us, my aunt Marie would ask my sisters and me to come and eat with them. After the meal my uncle Leon would make me crawl under the dining room table to pick up the crumbs of bread that had fallen on the oriental carpet.

  My father and mother never went to eat chez eux. My father didn’t get along with Leon. They argued and cursed each other all the time. In fact, nobody in the family on my mother’s side liked my father. They all said that he was a good-for-nothing. I’ll go into that too when the time comes, and tell how they treated my father.

  I was afraid of my uncle Leon. He never hit me, but he screamed at me and insulted me all the time. Everybody in the family was afraid of him. I think my aunt Marie was afraid of him too, because she did a lot of things behind his back. For instance, sometimes when my sisters and I were coming home from school, and she was in her apartment, she would quickly open the door as we came up the stairs and shove a piece of bread or a fruit into our hands, and tell us, Quick go upstairs and don’t tell Tonton Léon.

  Tonton, that’s what we called Leon, even though my sisters and I didn’t really like him. He was not nice, and on top of that he was a self-impressed snob. My father used to say, Léon, c’est un nouveau riche snob. Leon always wore a tie, whileworking in his atelier, and a suit jacket when he sat at the table to eat. He looked like the French actor Fernandel.

  In Aunt Rachel’s Fur I told how, once a week, Fernandel would come to visit the lady who lived in the fancy villa on our street. She was the only rich person in our neighborhood. So I’m not going to tell that story again. No, I’m ...

  Ah, go ahead Federman, tell us again how Fernandel came every Thursday to visit that rich lady. Those who haven’t read Aunt Rachel’s Fur might be interested.

  Okay, I’ll tell Fernandel again, and after that I’ll describe our crummy one-room apartment on the third floor where the five of us lived.

  Fernandel was a famous actor with horse-like teeth and a huge smile that made people laugh. He was a vaudeville comedian before he became a movie star. He always played funny parts. His most famous role was that of an irascible Italian village priest called Don Camillo, at war with the communist mayor of the village. He was tall and gangling. The people in our neighborhood who had seen him when he came to visit the rich lady used to say that my uncle Leon looked like Fernandel.

  That rich lady lived in a fancy private villa with a huge garden enclosed by a tall fence. She had an old gardener who was deaf. In the garden there was a statue of a naked woman. A statue of a Greek goddess. When the gardener was not working in the garden the older boys from the neighborhood would look at the statue through the fence and giggle. Everybody in the neighborhood called that lady La Comtesse de Montrouge. She was beautiful. She had long dark hair and very dark eyes. She wore elegant clothes, and many different hats. She had a big car with a chauffeur who came to fetch her whenever she wanted to go out.

  When the children were playing in the street, and the big car would arrive, all the games stopped, and we would stare at La Comtesse, and she would wave to us with her gloved hand.

  When I first started masturbating, I don’t remember exactly how old I was, I would often see La Comtesse inside my closed eyes.

  Please excuse the digression, but that just came to me.

  Anyway, every Thursday Fernandel came to visit this beautiful lady who lived in the villa, number 15 rue Louis Rolland, just down the street from our house.

  The reason we could see Fernandel when he came is because on Thursdays there was no school. In those days the children went to school all day Saturday but not on Thursday. That’s why we were playing in the street when Fernandel came to visit.

  As soon as his big black automobile with huge silver headlights stopped in front of the villa of La Comtesse, all the children would run to look at him, but never too close. Movie stars don’t like to be stared at. Exactly at one o’clock, every Thursday, Fernandel would step out of the car, his hat lowered over his eyes, the collar of his coat pulled up to his ears. He looked like a spy. And he would quickly go inside the villa. He would stay until his chauffeur came back to get him exactly at five. Every Thursday, without exception. This is true. All the people who lived on our street bragged that they had seen Fernandel in person.

  What did Fernandel do during these four hours in the house of this lady? Nobody knew, but the older boys would giggle and say that he came to play dominos with La Comtesse.

  In any case, it’s because people had seen Fernandel in person that they could say that my uncle Leon looked like him.

 
One could have realized that by going to the movies to see the Fernandel films. They were always playing in the Montrouge cinema. But to see him in person was more real. I liked Fernandel’s movies, he always played the parts of a clumsy man, but I couldn’t go see them very often because I didn’t have money. Sometimes, like the other boys, I would sneak into the cinema without paying. Except that one day I got caught and kicked out. After that, I was too scared to try again. Especially because the man who caught me told me that the next time he catches me sneaking into the cinema he would call the police and tell my parents.

  I once asked my mother why Fernandel came to visit this lady? and my mother told me that maybe they were related. Maybe she’s his sister or a cousin. How can that be? I said. She’s so beautiful, and Fernandel is so ugly. That means nothing, my mother said. But my sister Sarah, who was listening to what I asked, started laughing, and said to me, you’re so stupid.

  It was true that Fernandel, without his actor make-up, was not very good-looking. Neither was my uncle Leon who had an ugly face with big vitreous green eyes, thick lips, and a loud voice. He yelled all the time. He would argue with everybody, especially with my father.

  Leon, like Fernandel in the movie when he played the priest Don Camillo, was always at war against the communists, and Leon hated my father because he was a communist. A Trotskyist.

  Somehow, I think my uncle Leon liked me, even though he mocked me all the time, and treated me like a slave. Maybe he thought of himself as a father to me, since my father was not at home very often. My father was an artist. A starving artist, beside being a Trotskyist.

  I’ll tell more about him later.

  Now I want to describe our apartment on the third floor, on the left side of the landing. It was just one room divided in two by a big heavy curtain. It’s my mother who had had the idea of the curtain. This way, on one side of the curtain was the dining room, and on the other a bedroom, but the whole room was not very large. My parents slept behind the curtain, and sometimes at night we could hear them breathing heavily.

  I slept on a little cot in a corner of what we called the dining room, the space on the side of the curtain where we did everything. I slept next to the window. During the night, if our green salamander-stove was lit, from my bed I would stare at its little mica windows, especially the two that were broken. They looked like the red eyes of a monster. I would watch the coal burning inside, and I invented all kinds of stories about wild fires, houses burning, and escape. I would see myself as a courageous firefighter. Many years later when I read William Blake and came across that beautiful line of his, Fire delights in its form, I remembered the fire inside our little pot-stove that looked like a puffy green frog.

  My two sisters slept together in the kitchen on a folding cot. Un litcage. During the day it was folded with the mattress inside and pushed against a wall of the kitchen. At night, when that bed was opened, it blocked the entrance to the kitchen. Our kitchen was more like a narrow corridor than a room. It was not practical, because when my father or me had to go piss in the sink, we had to step on my sisters’ bed, and they would complain, and scream, especially Sarah, the older one.

  You’re disgusting, the two of you, she would say. You have no manners. It stinks. Can’t you go downstairs to the cabinet to do your dirty things?

  There was no toilet in our apartment. The W.C. was downstairs in the courtyard.

  In Leon and Marie’s apartment, there was a place to go faire caca et pipi. They had a toilet installed with the bathtub. They had it installed inside one of their closets, which was quite something, because before the war, the period I am telling about, only rich people had toilets in their apartments.

  But for us, my father and me, it was either the kitchen sink or the chamber pot.

  Of course we had a chamber pot since my sisters and my mother couldn’t use the sink. But for my father and me the chamber pot was not practical because if we peed standing up it would splash all over. So we had to crouch over the chamber pot the way my sisters and my mother did.

  We also had a pail. Un seau hygiènique. And every morning it was my job to go empty it in the W.C. in the courtyard. Oh, did I hate doing that.

  This pail was a big part of my childhood. I complained every morning when I had to carry that filthy pail downstairs to empty it. I moaned and groaned and cursed saying, It’s always me who has to do this dirty work, why can’t Sarah carry the pail downstairs, she’s older and stronger than me, why can’t she empty the pail? That’s what I would whine every morning when my father shouted at me because I hadn’t yet emptied the pail. Why can’t Sarah do it sometimes. And it’s true that my sister Sarah was stronger than me. She would kick me and punch me when we fought, and she always won. How come it’s always me who has to empty that stupid pail? But my father would say that it wasn’t a job for a girl, and when I kept on whining he just slapped me across the face and shouted, Get the hell out of here you lazy bum! So every morning I went down the three flights of stairs with my stinking pail.

  My father was not mean, but when I did something stupid, or when I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, he wouldn’t hesitate to swat me.

  Ah, my father, did he have a rough life. Maybe that’s why he yelled all the time. I think he failed in everything, as a father, a husband, an artist, a man. He always argued with my mother, but especially with Leon. I don’t know if Leon and Marie made my parents pay rent for our one room apartment upstairs, but most of the disputes had to do with money.

  I’ll have to tell more about my father and the rest of the family, but now I want to finish the story of our slop-pail.

  As I said, every morning I went down the three flights of stairs with that filthy pail and emptied it in the toilet at the far end of the courtyard. It was heavy because during the night everybody had used it. I had to be careful not to splash myself when I emptied it into the hole in the ground in the cabinet. The toilet had no seat. It was just a hole in the ground with a place marked for your feet. Today in Paris there are still cafes with toilets like this where you have to crouch to do your thing. It’s disgusting. You splash all over your legs. That’s why I had to be careful when I emptied my pail, otherwise I ended up with shit all over my shoes and legs. After that I had to rinse the pail under a small brass faucet outside on the wall. In the winter the water was so cold my hands were all red and frozen when I went back upstairs. Oh, how I hated that pail, but we had to have one. There was no way we were going to go down three flights of stairs to the toilet when it was dark and cold outside. Of course, it was easier for me and my father than for my mother and sisters, because at least we could pee in the sink standing up.

  My mother complained about it all the time, saying that it was not hygienic to urinate in the same place where she prepared the food, and besides, it set a bad example for the girls. My sisters would really scream when we did it in the sink. They would say, hiding their faces under the covers or covering their eyes with their hands, We’re not looking, our eyes are closed. But I think that Sarah and even my little sister Jacqueline were cheating. I’m sure they were peeking at our thing through their fingers even though we were careful to hide our thing with one hand. Of course, we couldn’t do le grand besoin in the sink, therefore the necessity of the pail and ...

  Federman, do you think it’s necessary for you to go on and on with those sordid details of your miserable childhood?

  I have to be specific in describing the conditions of our life in France before the war so that people will understand why I had to escape from there, and what I became today. A good Californian bourgeois who spends his time telling stories and playing golf. What I am describing here is historical.

  A childhood, Jean-Paul Sartre once said, is cooked in all kinds of sauces. According to him, we are all shaped by the lousy conditions of our childhood, rich or poor, happy or unhappy, doesn’t matter. Or to put it another way, we are all molded by the tampering we were subjected to as children.

  OK, j
ust a few more words about the pail. It was so much a part of our lives in that little apartment.

  Whenever we needed to use the pail or the chamber pot we had to hide in the kitchen, or else go behind the curtain when the others were in the other part of the room. Of course, at night we didn’t have to hide since it was dark. The best place to use the pail was behind the heavy curtain that separated the dinning room from the bedroom.

  As I said, it was my mother who had that idea of dividing the room in two with that curtain when my sisters and I became old enough to understand what parents sometimes do in bed when they breathe heavily.

  If one of my sisters or me needed the pail during the night, we had to go get it behind the curtain near my father’s side of the bed because my father used it all the time, especially to spit in. My father didn’t piss very often. He had trouble pissing because he had kidney stones, like Montaigne.

  It is well known that Montaigne suffered from kidney stones. He even mentions it in his essays.

  My father made a terrible fuss when he had to take a leak in the middle of the night. We could hear him groaning with pain behind the curtain, and on top of that he spat blood all the time because of his tuberculosis.

  One of his lungs had been removed, and in its place the doctors had put a thing in his chest like a little balloon. They called it a pneumothorax, and once a week my father had to go to the Montrouge clinic to have oxygen pumped into that balloon. To do that, the nurse used a syringe with a long needle which she plunged into his chest.

  I saw how it was done because I often went with my father to the clinic to be x-rayed. My sisters too. Children of tubercular people had to have their chests x-rayed regularly.

  At the end of the week, when the oxygen in his pneumothorax was running out, Papa had trouble breathing, and at night when he was asleep he would make little whistling sounds that prevented the rest of us from sleeping, and he often leaned over the pail to spit blood.