Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (32 page)

I

C
HILDREN WHO LIVE
in cities are said to grow up faster than other children. They see and hear strange things almost every day, and even if they cultivate a spirit of indifference and try to be unobtrusive, their routines and beliefs are always coming under attack. The daily bus-ride can suddenly become a dangerous adventure, and the puzzle of streets between home and school can turn into a haunted labyrinth. A whole
quartier
can be overshadowed by a misanthropic dog, a friendly beggar, a cellar window, a perplexing caricature on a wall or by any of the million objects and creatures of which a child’s itinerary is composed. Parents might complain about ‘the same old thing, day in, day out’, but every child knows that the city changes all the time, and even the things that don’t change can look different from one day to the next. Parents are not authorities on the teeming life of the metropolis. There are many things that they don’t notice or that they try to ignore, because not even the most sympathetic parent wants to relive the terrors of childhood.

So many strange things kept happening in Paris in those difficult years that Parisian children must have grown up even faster than usual. They grew up, however, in only one sense. Statistics show that the juvenile population as a whole was actually getting shorter and lighter. The pink vitamin pills and protein-rich ‘Biscuits Pétain’ that were handed out at school had no noticeable effect, and there was little that mothers could do except to disguise the perennial swede as something more enticing, or to serve the bean soup with beans one night and chestnuts the next.

Boys and girls who lived in a constant state of hunger and gastronomic disappointment were more than usually sensitive to the city’s tricks and transformations. In normal circumstances, they would soon have shrugged off the little miseries of urban life, but an empty stomach lends its ominous rumblings to every minor inconvenience. The booths on the boulevards that used to sell spinning-tops and bonbons sold dreary things such as phrase books and bicycle-repair kits. Almost overnight, the infant economy collapsed. Postage stamps and model cars quickly reached unaffordable prices, and some toy shops closed down and their owners went away. There were so many upsetting rules and restrictions that it was hard to believe that Maréchal Pétain, who was known to be fond of children, had been told what was going on in Paris. The pond of the Palais-Royal was drained of water, and a boy who had always gone there with his boat of sardine tins and bobbins now had to walk all the way to the Tuileries Gardens, where the lake was too big for a little boat. Other children went to the park and found that their favourite climbing-tree had been cut down for firewood. Rationing affected children’s lives in so many ways that no statistic could possibly encapsulate the misery it caused. When shoes wore out, they had to wear uncomfortable wooden soles marked ‘Smelflex’, or clumpy clogs, which made it impossible to run. Dolls were forced to make do with the clothes they already had, and some big dolls even had their clothes taken away from them.

Children who had never been fussy about their food found that sweet things tasted bitter, as though someone was playing a trick on them. Beautiful cakes and pyramids of fruit in shop windows had notices in front of them saying ‘
É talage factice
’, which meant that they weren’t real. Nothing was what it seemed any more. New signs appeared all over the city with words on them that meant nothing or that seemed to be misspelled or mixed up with real words, like ‘
Gross Paris
’ or ‘
Soldatenkino
’. Some of the words were too long and had to be written in very small letters to fit on the sign. The signs were put up by the Germans, who were also called the Boches, and it was usually the Boches who were blamed for everything bad, though sometimes it was the English or the Jews. Worst of all, mothers and fathers were nearly always in a bad mood, because they had to queue for everything, or because they kept running out of cigarettes.

Life under the Boches was probably even harder for older brothers and sisters, who remembered what things had been like before the war. Children who had just started school found some of the new things quite exciting. A boy who lived near Les Invalides saw the statue of a general being blown up with dynamite, and some of the pieces of stone went flying over the neighbouring houses. Some children liked to watch the long lights flailing across the night sky and the red lights coming down in the distance, and they also liked to imitate the sound of the sirens. When the clocks were put forward an hour, everyone had to carry a torch to school, and the bright circles that went dancing along the street looked like a procession in a fairy-tale. Birthdays were often disappointing, but many children who had never been allowed to have pets were given guinea-pigs to look after. Some people even kept rabbits in the bathtub which had to be fed with grass from the park. One girl who lived in an apartment block in Belleville knew a woman whose rabbit ate her food coupons when she wasn’t looking, and the woman said that at least she wouldn’t feel bad when she cut the rabbit’s throat and threw it in a pot with the carrots and the swede.

A
LTHOUGH MOST PARENTS
kept saying that life was getting harder all the time, it was only after two years of this that many children–especially those who lived in certain parts of the city–began to feel that things really
were
getting worse.

One day that spring, in thousands of homes all over Paris, the wireless was unplugged and taken away, along with all the bicycles that were kept on the landing with padlocks on them because there were so many bicycle thieves about. Telephones were disconnected, and since they were not allowed to use a telephone box or to go into a café, the only way to ask relatives in the country to send more food was to use one of the letters on which the words were already printed: ‘The——-family is well’ ‘——-wounded——killed——in prison’ ‘——need food——money’, etc.–but then they weren’t allowed to buy stamps to put on the envelope. Sundays became quite boring because the families who were singled out in this way were not allowed to go to the park, the playground or the swimming pool, or even to the market or to any of the museums, and they couldn’t even visit relatives in hospital (though they still had to go to school). They couldn’t go to the theatre or the cinema, which meant that they missed seeing Charles Trenet sing ‘
C’est la romance de Paris
’.

It became quite hard to think of things to do, except read books, and even that became difficult. A boy called Georges who lived in the third
arrondissement
had to take all his library books back to the town hall. The librarian, whose name was Mlle Boucher, saw him come in with his books, and she said to him,

‘You like reading, don’t you?’

Georges nodded his head.

‘And I expect you’d like to go on reading, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Georges, ‘but I’m not allowed to now.’

Then she said to him in a whisper,

‘Come back this evening at half-past five and wait for me outside.’

At half-past five, Mlle Boucher wheeled her bicycle through the gates of the town hall and told Georges to get on the back. They went along the Rue de Bretagne and turned down the Rue de Turenne. Ten minutes later, they stopped in front of the Musée Carnavalet, which was where Mlle Boucher lived, because her father was the director of the museum. She took Georges inside and showed him the library and told him that he could come back whenever he wanted and read all the books he liked, and this is what he did until the day when he and his family were forced to leave Paris.

Georges knew that Mlle Boucher was doing him a special favour. He also knew that she was very brave, because when she took him on her bicycle, he was wearing his yellow star. At school, the teachers had told everyone that they were not to treat the children who had to wear the stars any differently, and most of their classmates felt sorry for them, except when they were children that no one had liked anyway. But there were also pictures pasted up on walls and printed in newspapers that were supposed to be pictures of children like himself, and he often looked in the mirror to see if he had the same horrid nose and silly ears as the people in the pictures.

Parents had to use their clothing coupons to buy the stars, and older sisters complained that the star, which was mustard-yellow, didn’t match any of the clothes that they had. Some of their neighbours stopped talking to them and even said rude things to them in public. One child’s aunt came home in tears, and when she took off her headscarf her head was covered in soap because the woman at the hairdresser whose job it was to rinse the customers’ hair had refused to wash it off. And then instead of having nothing nice to eat, they sometimes had nothing at all, because their mothers were only allowed to queue for food between three and four in the afternoon, by which time all the food had gone.

This was in the summer of 1942. For some people, it was the last summer they ever spent in Paris, and those who stayed behind sometimes wondered whether they were still living in the same city.

II

T
HAT
J
ULY
, two days after everyone had celebrated Bastille Day, some children found themselves in a part of the city where they had never been before, at least not on their own.

Nat stood on the street where all the green-and-white buses with what looked like friendly faces were lined up bumper to bumper. In front of him was a short street at the end of which was the Seine. Though he couldn’t see it, he knew it was the Seine because there were no houses, just empty space where the buildings would have been. And then he saw a seagull swerve lazily.

He clutched his coat about him like a thief, without stopping to button it, not because he was cold, but to hide his sweater. He could still feel his mother’s hand on his back where she had given him a shove, and he began to walk forwards, towards the Seine. At the end of the street, he turned right without noticing. This was the Quai de Grenelle, which was also the name of a Métro station.

The wind blew along the river in gusts and made his eyes feel sore and dry. He put one foot in front of the other and thought about going back inside to where all the others were. Then the wind brought down the rumble of rubber and metal and the elongated screech. He looked up and saw the green carriages heading out towards the seagull.–
Le Métro aérien
…It was called that as though, on that section of the line, it was a different kind of train altogether, as though it might leave the tracks with a sudden silence and run off into the sky.

The wooden steps went up from the middle of the street. The street was sheltered by the underside of the tracks like the roof of a basement. He began to climb into the cage of metalwork. He was still extremely thirsty and he could still smell the urine on his trousers. Across the road, a street-sweeper had stopped sweeping and was watching him climb the steps. At the top was a woman in a uniform with no expression on her face. She sat under the sign that said
SORTIE
and looked like the woman who opened cubicles in a public toilet, only more grubby. Two policemen came from under the sign marked
PASSAGE INTERDIT
. The woman was called the
poinçonneuse
because she punched a hole in the ticket, which he did not have, and his mother had not put any money in his pockets. He heard the sound of clanking chains and sliding metal that meant a train was coming.

T
HE WOMEN
were shouting, ‘
On a soif! On a soif! Nos enfants ont soif!
’ They pushed away from the concrete wall, holding each other by the arm, bulging out into the street, staring at the eyes half-hidden by visors, each one picking out a pair of eyes like infantrymen advancing on an army. Behind them, inside the great closed space, the hum of humankind sweltering in the smell of shit and antiseptic. Then the cry went out, ‘
Une épicerie ouverte!
’

Some of the women broke away from the others and were clattering across the street. As they ran, they were digging in their pockets and shoulder-bags. They were thinking of bottles of water, calculating the weight and bulk of fruit or biscuits, or even a tin of Banania as a compromise if they could get some milk. The line of policemen adopted a waiting position: allow them to buy some water; keep the others close to the entrance between the concrete pillars, under the red letters on the dirty glazed arch:
VEL
’
D
’
HIV
.

Anna was standing near the entrance with her mother. Now–as she had been doing since the day before yesterday–she relieved herself standing up with all her clothes on, because this sudden emergence into the open air was too good an opportunity to waste. Her hair had been combed as if she was about to go on an errand. She felt her mother thrust her sideways and then try to pull her back or try to get a better grip to push her away. She clutched at skirts and pushed against bottoms to let the women know she was there behind them, because they were stamping and going backwards and forwards.

Two policemen were standing by the buses. After she had walked past them, there was the street ahead of her, and the air rushed into her lungs and when one of the policemen called out to her to come back, she said, ‘I wasn’t in there. I only came to find out about my family.’

She did not look back, because the policemen might not believe her, and she did not run, which was obviously the temptation, because her clogs would come off, and she would have to stop to put them on again or leave them lying in the street.