Soon after we returned, I started school again. But even school was different. The games we played were not as much fun. We often went home directly after school rather than play in the street. Besides carrying my school bag, I also had to carry a gas mask. Everybody had to carry a gas mask everywhere they went. Sometimes in our apartment my sisters and I would put on our gas masks just for the fun of it, but mother would immediately tell us to put them back into the canister. That's what that metallic case was called.
My sister Sarah started working in a factory. I think it was a factory where they made lampshades. My father also got a job drawing models for a clothing manufacturer. He stayed home more than before. He did the drawings on the dining room table. Only once in a while would he go out to play cards at
the Metropole Café, but he would come home early, before the curfew.
One day he was arrested for having participated in some political gathering. We thought we would never see him again. I remember my mother frantically rushing to the police station to find out what had happened. By that time a lot of men, even married men, were being sent to Germany to work in factories. But he stayed in jail only one day. He was sent home because he had tuberculosis. This was the time when all the Jews had to declare themselves. As I said earlier, because we lived in a suburb where there were only a few Jews, my father decided that we should not declare ourselves. But the anti-Semite in our building denounced us, and my parents had to go to the
préfecture
to declare their identities and their possessions as Jews. And so did Leon and Marie.
Soon after that my mother had to sew the yellow star on all our clothes. I could still go to school, but no longer to swimming pools, museums, libraries, cinemas, and other public places.
It was now the beginning of 1942, according to the newspapers and the radio, the Germans were winning the war. But the people who had a radio would listen quietly to the Free French Radio from London, and even though the emissions were all garbled they would hear that it was the British and the Americans, who were now also in the war, who were winning. It gave people a little hope, even though our daily life was getting more and more difficult and sad.
By now Jewish children were no longer allowed to go to school. So I stayed home. I didn't feel like playing with my tin soldiers. I was too old for that. Nor with my stamp collection. I had reread all my Jules Verne. I would stand at the open window and watch the birds fly, or else count how many people in the street walked past our house, or how many cars
would go by. Sometimes Maman would come and stand next to me and say, Soon the war will be finished, you'll see, the Americans are going to win the war for us, and you'll be able to go to a
lycée,
and then she would put her arm around me and squeeze me, but I would pull away from her.
Things were bad now. Jews were not allowed to take the metro. So we walked wherever we had to go. But mostly we stayed home. Since we didn't own a radio we could not listen to the news. Five of us lived in the same space, but separately from one another. Leon and Marie had a radio, and once in a while my mother would listen to the news with them, especially the news that came from London, and she would tell my father what she had heard. My father still didn't get along with Leon.
By early Spring rumors were circulating that Jewish men were being arrested and sent to labor camps in Germany. Only men.
And then July came. And on the 16
th
of that month, my childhood ended. After that ...
Federman, very interesting what you just told. Perhaps you should tell more.
I don't think I can, or even want to. It was such a depressing period. And what else is there to say. Everybody lived in fear and sadness.
Alright then, tell us, as you promised in your list, what happened with your cousin Salomon.
I don't know. It's a bit filthy. But since I promised, I suppose should do it.
Sometimes when I was doing my homework and I didn't understand something, especially problems of algebra or geometry, I would ask my cousin Salomon for help.
Salomon was four years older, and he had already studied all that. Besides, everybody in the family said that he was very smart, and gifted in the sciences, and that one day he would certainly become a doctor or a pharmacist. After the war Salomon became a tailor just like his father.
I think Salomon would have preferred to become a gangster. He looked like one of those Chicago gangsters in Hollywood movies. When he was older, and thought himself an adult, he always dressed like a gangster. Double-breasted suit that his father made for him. Salomon always got anything he wanted. So if he wanted a doublebreasted suit with stripes, he got it immediately. I think Leon liked when my aunts and uncles complimented him for the new suit he'd made for his son. Salomon was a living model for Leon.
With his gangster suit, Salomon would wear a felt hat with a wide brim pulled down over his eyes when he went out to Montparnasse to meet his friends, who dressed exactly like him. Many of Salomon's buddies had suits made by Leon. In a way, Salomon was like publicity for his father's work. He was good-looking. All the aunts kept telling him how handsome he was. His hair was black and curly. He would slick it back into a duck tail, pulled tight on the sides. He used a lot of brilliantine so his hair would shine and stay in place. Salomon was always so sure of himself. The way he dressed, the way he acted, the way he spoke let people know he was the son of rich parents.
I was so envious of Salomon. Especially of the way he combed his curly hair.
Mine was straight, with a part on the side, and always a bit messy. I didn't take care of my hair. In
My Body in Nine Parts
I tell that it was my mother who took care of my hair. She combed it, washed it, made the part on the side, took the lice out of it. She did everything one normally does to hair. After my mother was taken away I had to take care of my own hair. So I became more conscious of how it looked.
After the war, when I returned to Montrouge, I was combing my hair like Salomon, like Marco rather, I should say, since that was the non-Jewish name he gave himself during the war.
Once in a while, after the war, before I left for America, Salomon a.k.a Marco would let me come with him to the Montparnasse cafés where he hung out with his friends. They always called me
Marcotin,
as though I was a diminutive of Marco, but I liked the name.
Let's get back to what happened one day when I went to ask Salomon to help me with my homework.
I go down to his apartment. The door was not locked. I make sure to put my feet on the little
patins
when I go in. Salomon is not in the living room. I look for him in the other rooms, and I find him with his pants at his feet, masturbating in front of the armoire mirror in his parents' bedroom. He didn't get mad when he saw me. He didn't even blush. He turned towards me still holding his erection in his hand and asked, Don't you ever do that?
I didn't answer. I thought he was going to pull his pants up, instead he approached me, still holding his thing in his hand and said, Here suck it for me.
I moved away from him ready to run. I was terrified and embarrassed, but Salomon grabbed the back of my head and pulled me down toward his erection. I resisted even though he was much stronger than me. I struggled, kept pulling back. I even managed to tell him in a kind of sob that if he didn't let me go, I would tell his Father. But he continued to push my head down, and the tip of my nose touched his cock. It gave me a strange sensation. This time I really struggled and managed to escape his grip and I rushed out of the door. Salomon didn't follow me, he just shouted, if you tell my father, you'll pay for it. Keep your mouth shut
petit con.
I didn't say anything to anyone, but after that I never asked my cousin to help me with my homework. Somehow I managed alone. I was so angry and so scared of him, I avoided him, even in school.
For weeks after that, I kept rubbing my nose with my hand. It was like a tic. I was doing it all the time. My mother would say, Stop doing that. What's wrong with your nose? Does it itch? If you continue like that your nose will be crooked, and all red.
It's true that my nose is big, crooked, and always red. Ah, did my nose make me suffer.
Speaking of my nose, one day in school, when we were studying human anatomy, the teacher, the ugly one, was explaining the different colors of the pigmentation of the skin. She was saying that even among white people there are nuances in the color of the pigment of their skin. For example, she said, pointing to me,
Raymond a le pigment rouge.
And all the boys in the class started laughing and shouting,
Raymond a le piment rouge ... Raymond a le piment rouge!
The word
piment
in French slang means the nose.
The teacher finally managed to stop the laughter. But after that, often in the playground the boys would chant,
Raymond a le pigment rouge ... Raymond a le pigment rouge!
It would make me so angry. But there was nothing I could do about my red nose. And besides, both winter and summer, it was always running. So in school besides being called
fils-de-tubard,
I was also called
petit morveux.
I had snot coming out of my nose all the time. And when I didn't have a handkerchief, I would wipe my nose with my sleeve. My left sleeve.
I don't remember if I mentioned that I was born left-handed, and became right-handed after I broke my left arm when I fell off a tree. It happened during
les colonies de vacances dans le Poitou.
I fell from a cherry tree. I must have been seven or eight years old.
I wrote quite a bit about my nose in
My Body in Nine Parts,
and also told why I became right-handed. So no need to go into that again. But I do want to add a few things about my hair and how ...
Federman, damn right you've said enough about your nose. Your big crooked nose is everywhere in your writing. And the same about your broken arm, and how you became ambidextrous, and also about your scars, and all the rest.
But that's what marked my childhood. These are the marks that you never forget while all the rest vanishes into the inexpressible. Ah, my nose. As I once put it, a Jewish nose is a little tragedy. In my case, it was more a tragicomedy.
Alright, I'll stop talking about my nose, but I'd like to return a moment to my hair.
In school I often caught lice. When my mother saw me scratching my head, she would say, Come here so I can comb those out of your hair.
She would use a special lice-comb with tight little teeth, and she would comb my hair hard. I would cry that it hurt, and when she pulled the comb of my hair it was full of lice. I remember well now how she would crush them on the comb with her fingernail. She did the same thing with my sisters when they too caught lice in school, but I seemed to always have more lice than them even though they had more hair.
Besides lice there were other little vermin in our house. Bed bugs. Huge cockroaches in the kitchen. And even mice. But no rats. The rats stayed in the cellar.
In the morning if I had been bitten by bed bugs, and I was scratching myself, my mother would rub my body with alcohol.
My father when he saw cockroaches in the kitchen would crush them with his shoes, and then he would tell me to pick up the yellowish goo that came out of the cockroaches and I would throw it into the garbage. That
bouillie
that came out of the crushed cockroaches looked like sperm. It was disgusting.
To catch the mice, my father would set a spring trap with a little piece of bread or cheese in it. He placed it next to the wall where the mice were hiding, and in the morning if there was a dead mouse in the trap, he would tell me to take it out. But I would start crying because I was so scared to touch the mouse. So my father would take it out of the trap holding it by the tail and swing it before my face. My sisters would mock me and would called me
petit trouillard,
and me ...
Federman, do you really need to tell us all that. The snot that came out of your nose, the lice, the bed-bugs, the cockroaches, the mice. Do you think your readers will like that?
I'm not going to censor my childhood just to please the readers. What I am telling here is historical. That's how we lived in those days. In the 1930's. I say it as it was.
Besides, these little beasts were not only in our house. It was like that in all the houses in Montrouge, and I am sure also in all the houses in France. Especially those of poor people. That's why what I just told is historical.
If it offends the readers, let them read something else. The charming novels of La Comtesse de Ségur.
The only little animals I liked were the birds that landed on the window ledges. They were sparrows, I think. I would leave bread crumbs on the ledge and watch from behind the curtain not to scare them. I wanted so much to be able to fly like them. Maybe that's why years later in America, I volunteered for the paratroopers during the Korean war. Just to be in the sky. But that's another story.
I would have liked to have been a bird. Except that in the winter, when it was very cold outside and it snowed, I could imagine how the poor birds were suffering. They were lined up next to each other on electric wires or on the leafless branches of trees. I would ...
Federman, this time you did it. Here you are, sinking into sentimentality. You were warned.
I love birds. Why can't I allow myself a bit of sentimentality about birds? When I lived In New York, I had a friend who was a bird. A pigeon. I called him Charlot. He had only one leg. I told about him in
Smiles on Washington Square.
Yes, we know. So forget the birds and tell us something else.
Alright then, I'll tell how I once stole a ring in a department store.