The Years Read online

  They traveled back to times before their own existence, the Crimean War and the siege of 1870, when the Parisians ate rats.

  In the time-before of which they spoke, there was nothing but war and hunger.

  They finished by singing Ah le petit vin blanc and Fleur de Paris, shouting the refrain, bleu-blanc-rouge sont les couleurs de la patrie in a deafening chorus. They stretched their arms and laughed, Here’s another one the Boches won’t get!

  The children didn’t listen. They rushed from the table the moment they were excused and took advantage of the holiday goodwill to play forbidden games, jumping on beds, swinging upside down. But they remembered every detail. Next to that wondrous time, the episodes whose order they would not retain for years, the Rout, the Occupation, the Exodus, the Landing, the Victory, the nameless time in which they grew seemed colorless. They regretted they had not been born (or were only infants) in the days when people were forced to take to the roads in bands and sleep on straw like gypsies. Not having lived this way would stamp them with a lasting sorrow. They were saddled with other people’s memories and a secret nostalgia for the time they’d missed by so little, along with the hope of living it one day.

  All that remained of the flamboyant epic were the gray and silent ruins of blockhouses carved into cliffsides, and heaps of rubble in the towns as far as the eye could see. Rusty objects, twisted bedframes loomed out of the debris. Merchants who had lost their businesses set up shop in temporary huts along the edges of the ruins. Shells overlooked by mine-clearers exploded in the bellies of the little boys who played with them. The newspapers warned, Do not touch munitions! Doctors removed tonsils from children with delicate throats, who woke screaming from the ether anesthesia and were forced to drink boiling milk. On faded posters, General de Gaulle, in three-quarter profile, gazed into the distance from under his kepi. On Sunday afternoons we played Ludo and Old Maid.

  The frenzy that had followed Liberation was fading. All that people thought about was going out, and the world was full of desires that clamored for immediate satisfaction. Anything that comprised a first time since the war provoked a stampede—bananas, fireworks, National Lottery tickets. Entire neighborhoods, from elderly ladies propped up by their daughters to infants in strollers, flocked to the funfair, the torchlight tattoo, and the Bouglione circus, where they narrowly escaped being crushed in the melee. They took to the road in praying, singing crowds to welcome the statue of Our Lady of Boulogne and walk her back the following day over many kilometers. They never missed a chance, secular or religious, to be outside with other people, as if they still yearned to live in a group. On Sunday evenings, the coaches returned from the seaside with tall youths in shorts clinging to the luggage roofs and singing at the top of their voices. Dogs roamed free and mated in the middle of the streets.

  But even this time started to become a memory of golden days, whose loss we keenly felt when the radio played Je me souviens des beaux dimanches . . . Mais oui c’est loin c’est loin tout ça. Then the children began to regret having been too small to really experience the Liberation.

  Still, we grew up quietly, “happy to be alive and see the world as it is,” amidst the recommendations not to touch unknown objects and the ceaseless bemoaning of rationing, oil and sugar coupons, corn bread that sat heavy on the stomach, coke that didn’t heat, and will there be chocolate and jam for Christmas? We started going to school with slates and chalk-holders, passing fields that had been cleared of debris and leveled for reconstruction. We played Drop the Handkerchief and Pass the Ring, danced in the round while singing Bonjour Guillaume as-tu bien déjeuné, played fives against the wall to Petite bohémienne toi qui voyages partout, and tramped up and down the schoolyard arm-in-arm chanting who is going to play hide-and-seek. We caught scabies and head lice that we smothered with towels doused in Marie Rose antiparasitic. One after the other, we clambered into the TB X-ray truck, keeping our coats and mufflers on. We spent the first medical visit giggling with shame to be wearing only panties in a room not in the least warmed by the flitting blue flame in a dish of methylated spirits on the table by the nurse. Soon, for the very first Youth Day, dressed in white from head to toe, we would march through the streets to the racetrack, cheered by the crowd. Between the sky and the wet grass, to the music that blared from the loudspeakers, together we would execute the group gymnastics set with a sense of grandeur and solitude.

  The speeches said we represented the future.

  From the polyphonic clangor of holiday meals, before the quarrels began with eternal enmities sworn, another great story emerged in fragments, intertwined with the one about war: the story of origins.

  Men and women began to appear, some nameless except for a kinship title, “father,” “grandfather,” “great-grandmother,” reduced to a character trait, a funny or tragic anecdote, the Spanish flu, the embolism, or kick from a horse that carried them off—and children who hadn’t lived to be our age, a multitude of characters we’d never know. Over years, and with no small effort, the tangled threads of family were unraveled, until at last the “two sides” could be clearly distinguished, the people who were something to us by blood from those who were “nothing.”

  Family narrative and social narrative are one and the same. The voices around the table mapped out the territories of youth: countrysides and farms where, for time immemorial, men had been hired hands and girls housemaids; the factory where they all had met, stepped out together, and married, the small businesses to which the most ambitious had risen. They told stories that contained no personal detail except for births, weddings, and funerals, no travel except to regiments in distant garrison towns, existences entirely filled by work, its harsh conditions, the perils of drink. School was a mythical backdrop, a brief golden age with the schoolmaster as its rough god, equipped with an iron ruler for the rapping of knuckles.

  The voices imparted a legacy of poverty and deprivation that long pre-dated the war and the restrictions. They plunged us into a timeless night, “a bygone era,” and rhymed off its pleasures and difficulties, customs and practical wisdom:

  —living in a house with a dirt floor

  —wearing galoshes

  —playing with a rag doll

  —washing clothes in wood ash

  —sewing a little pouch of garlic inside children’s nightshirts near the navel to rid them of worms

  —obeying parents and getting boxed on the ears anyway, just think if I’d given them lip!

  Drew up an inventory of ignorances, yesterday’s unknowns and nevers:

  —red meat, oranges

  —social security, the family allowance, and retirement at sixty-five

  —vacations

  Recalled the sources of pride—the strikes of 1936, the Popular Front, before that, the worker counted for nothing

  We, the little people, back at the table for dessert, stayed to listen to the risqué tales that in the atmosphere of postprandial ease, the assembly ceased to hold in check, forgetting young ears. Songs of the parents’ youth told of Paris and girls who fell into streams, gigolos and gigolettes, hoodlums who lurked at the city gates, Le Grand Rouquin, L’Hirondelle du faubourg, Du gris que l’on prend dans ses doigts et qu’on roule, songs of passion and pathos to which the singer, eyes closed, gave her entire body, and all around the table, tears were dabbed away with the corners of napkins. Then it was our turn to melt the company’s hearts with Étoile des neiges.

  Darkened photos passed from hand to hand, the backs soiled by all the other fingers that had handled them at other meals, coffee and fat dissolved into an indefinable hue. No one recognized their parents—or anyone, come to that—in the stiff and somber newlyweds, the wedding guests in tiered rows along a wall. Nor did one see oneself in the half-naked baby of indistinct sex, who sat on a cushion, an alien creature from a mute and inaccessible time.

  After the war, at the never-ending table of holi
day meals, amidst the laughter and exclamations, our time will come soon enough, let’s enjoy it while it lasts, other people’s memories gave us a place in the world.

  Memory was transmitted not only through the stories but through the ways of walking, sitting, talking, laughing, eating, hailing someone, grabbing hold of objects. It passed body to body, over the years, from the remotest countrysides of France and other parts of Europe: a heritage unseen in the photos, lying beyond individual difference and the gaps between the goodness of some and the wickedness of others. It united family members, neighbors, and all those of whom one said “They’re people like us,” a repertory of habits and gestures shaped by childhoods in the fields and teen years in workshops, preceded by other childhoods, all the way back to oblivion:

  —eating noisily and displaying the progressive metamorphosis of food in the open mouth, wiping one’s lips with a piece of bread, mopping the gravy from a plate so thoroughly that it could be put away without washing, tapping the spoon on the bottom of the bowl, stretching at the end of dinner. Daily washing of the face only, the rest according to the degree of soiling—hands and forearms after work, the legs and knees of children on summer evenings—and saving the big scrub-downs for holidays

  —grabbing hold of things with force, slamming doors. Doing everything roughly, whether catching a rabbit by the ears, giving someone a peck on the cheek, or squeezing a child in one’s arms. On days when tempers flared, banging in and out of the house, slamming chairs around

  —walking with long strides, swinging one’s arms, sitting by flopping oneself onto the chair, and when standing again, freeing with a flick of the hand the cloth of the skirt caught between the buttocks. Old women sat by pushing a fist into the hollow of the apron

  —for men, the continual use of the shoulders in carrying a spade, planks, sacks of potatoes, and tired children on the way home from the fair

  —for women, wedging things between the knees and thighs: the coffee grinder, the bottle to uncork, the hen whose throat is to be cut and whose blood will drip into a basin

  —speaking loudly and grudgingly in every circumstance, as if one were forever obliged to bridle against the universe

  The language, a mangled French mixed with local dialect, was inseparable from the hearty booming voices, bodies squeezed into work smocks and blue overalls, single-story houses and little gardens, dogs that barked in the afternoon and the silence that preceded arguments, just as the rules of grammar and proper French were associated with the neutral intonations and white hands of the schoolmistress. A language without praise or flattery that contained the piercing rain, the beaches of flat gray stones beneath sheer cliffs, the night buckets emptied onto manure, the wine drunk by laborers. It served as a vehicle for beliefs and prescriptions:

  —observe the moon, for it governs the time of birth, the lifting of leeks, and the unpleasant routine for treating children’s worms

  —do not defy the cycle of the seasons to abandon coats and stockings, put the female rabbit to the male, or plant lettuces; there’s a right time for everything, a precious interval between “too early” and “too late,” difficult to quantify, when nature exerts her goodwill; children and cats born in winter don’t grow as well as others, and the sun in March can drive one insane

  —apply raw potato to burns, or “get the fire put out” by a neighbor who knows the magic formula; heal a cut with urine

  —respect bread, for the face of God is etched on every grain of wheat

  Like any language, this one created hierarchies, stigmatized slackers, unruly women, underhanded children, “satyrs” and “wastes of space,” praised “capable” people and industrious girls, recognized bigwigs and higher-ups, admonished, life will cut you down to size!

  It expressed reasonable desires and expectations: clean work, an indoor workplace, enough to eat, dying in bed

  —limits: don’t ask for the moon or things that cost the earth, be happy with what you’ve got

  —the dread of departures and the unknown because when you never leave home, even the next town is the ends of the earth

  —pride and injury, just because we’re from the country doesn’t mean we’re stupid

  But unlike our parents, we didn’t miss school to plant colza, shake apples from trees, or bundle dead wood. The school calendar had replaced the cycle of the seasons. The years ahead were school years, stacked on top of each other, space-times that opened in October and closed in July. When school started, we folded blue paper covers over the used books bequeathed to us by pupils a grade ahead. When we looked at their poorly erased names on the cover pages, and the words they’d underlined, we felt as if we had taken over for them, and they were cheering us on—they who had made it through, learned all those things in a year. We memorized poems by Maurice Rollinat, Jean Richepin, Emile Verhaeren, Rosamond Gérard, and songs, Mon beau sapin roi des forêts, C’est lui le voilà le dimanche avec sa robe de mai nouveau. We applied ourselves to making zero mistakes on dictations from the works of Maurice Genevoix, La Varende, Émile Moselly, Ernest Pérochon. We recited the grammar rules of correct French. Then as soon as we got home, without a second thought, we reverted to the original tongue, which didn’t force us to think about words but only things to say and not say—the language that clung to the body, was linked to slaps in the face, the Javel water smell of work coats, baked apples all winter long, the sound of piss in the night bucket, and the parents’ snoring.

  People’s deaths didn’t affect us at all.

  The black-and-white photo of a little girl in a dark swimsuit on a pebble beach. In the background, cliffs. She sits on a flat rock, sturdy legs stretched out very straight in front of her. She leans back on her arms, smiling, eyes closed, her head slightly tilted. One thick brown braid has been arranged in front, the other hangs down her back. These details reveal the desire to pose like the stars in Cinémonde or the ads for Ambre Solaire, to flee her humiliating and unimportant little-girl body. Her thighs, paler, like her upper arms, show the outlines of a dress and indicate that for this child, a holiday or an afternoon at the seaside are exceptions to the rule. The beach is deserted. Written on the back: August 1949, Sotteville-sur-Mer.

  She is about to turn nine, on holiday with her father, and her uncle and aunt who work at the rope factory. Her mother has remained in Yvetot to run the café-grocery, which never closes. Usually it is she who braids the girl’s hair in two tight plaits and secures them, coronet-style, around her head, with spring barrettes and ribbons. It may be that neither her father nor her aunt knows how to pin up her braids, or that she’s taking advantage of her mother’s absence to let them down.

  It is difficult to say what the girl is thinking or dreaming, and how she looks upon the years that have passed since the Liberation, which she remembers without effort.

  Maybe the images have already fled, except for the ones that will always resist loss of memory:

  —their arrival in the town reduced to rubble, the bitch in heat running away

  —the first day of school after Easter, and she doesn’t know anyone

  —the great expedition to Fécamp on a train with wooden benches, the entire family on her mother’s side; the grandmother wears a black rice straw hat, the cousins undress, bare-bottomed on the pebble beach

  —the hoof-shaped needle case made for Christmas with a scrap of shirt cloth

  —Pas si bête with Bourvil

  —secret games, pinching the earlobes with toothed curtain rings.

  Maybe she is gazing at the school years behind her, like a vast plain—the three grades she’s passed, the arrangement of the little desks, the one big desk for the teacher, the chalkboard, the schoolmates:

  —Françoise C, whom she envies for playing the clown with her hat in the shape of a cat’s head, who asked to borrow her handkerchief once during recess, blew her nose into it thickly, handed it back in a ball
, and ran away; her feeling of defilement and shame with the soiled handkerchief in her coat pocket for all of recess

  —Évelyne J, whose hand she grabbed under the desk and stuck down her underpants, making her touch the sticky little ball

  —F, whom no one ever talked to, sent to a sanatorium; at the medical exam she wore boy’s underpants, stained with caca, and all the girls watched her, giggling

  —the summers from before, already distant; one a scorcher, when the cisterns and wells ran dry, neighborhood people with jugs lined up at the fire hydrant, and Robic had won the Tour de France—another summer, rainy, when she collected mussels with her mother and aunt on the beach of Veules-les-Roses and they leaned over a hole in the cliff to see a dead soldier being dug up along with others, to be buried somewhere else

  Unless she has preferred, as usual, to combine the many imaginary possibilities borrowed from the Bibliothèque Verte or the Suzette serials with the dream of her future, as she feels it inside when she hears a love song on the radio.

  There is probably nothing on her mind that has to do with political events, crimes, random news items, and all that will later be acknowledged to have shaped the landscape of her childhood—a set of things known and “in the air,” Vincent Auriol, the war in Indochina, Marcel Cerdan, boxing champion of the world, Pierrot le fou, and Marie Besnard the arsenic poisoner.

  Nothing is certain but her desire to be grown-up, and the absence of the following memory:

  —that of the first time they said, before the photo of the baby on the cushion in a nightdress, and others, identical, oval-shaped and sepia, “That’s you,” forcing her to see herself in that other, shaped from chubby flesh, who’d lived a mysterious life in a time that no longer existed.

  France was immense, composed of populations distinguished by the food they ate and their ways of speaking. In July, the riders of the Tour cycled across the country, and we followed them stage by stage on the Michelin map tacked onto the kitchen wall. Most people spent their lives within the same fifty kilometers, and when the church trembled with the first triumphal bars of the hymn “In Our Home Be Queen,” we knew that home meant the place we lived, the town, or at most the département. The gateway to the exotic was the nearest big town, the rest of the world unreal. Those who were, or aspired to be, well educated enrolled in the Connaissance du monde documentary lectures. The others read Reader’s Digest or Constellation, “the world seen in French.” A postcard sent from Bizerte by a cousin doing his military service in Tunisia threw us into a state of moony, mute amazement.