Revolution Baby (17 page)

 

The next morning I woke up bright and early. It was still just as cold, maybe even colder, or maybe I was more tired and less resistant. I got to the station early enough to have a cocoa and a croissant. But first I had to buy my ticket. The man at the ticket office looked kinder than the one yesterday . . . but, for all that, he didn't have good news for me.

“There's no more nine o'clock bus on Fridays, hasn't been for ages, lad.”

“Yes but yesterday, the man at the ticket office, he said—”

“Yes I know, but he made a mistake, it happens to everyone. He doesn't work on Fridays, so he doesn't know, or he forgot.”

“And the next one, when is it?”

“At one o'clock.”

I let out a deep breath. I wished I could give it all up and go back to Paris. If I'd known, I would have stayed longer at the Red Cross, where it was warm. I went ahead and bought my ticket. I had enough money for two more croissants and another cocoa. My patience was exhausted—it wasn't fun anymore to sit at the bar, and time went by so very, very slowly.

Time at last. I got into the bus that took me to Verneuil, where all that was left to do was walk to “Candèssiritan.” I wanted to take my time, because I was uncomfortable after all at the thought of just showing up like that at the home of some people I didn't know and who had to take me in . . . but I discovered that the cold is an excellent remedy against shyness. I asked a lady who had been on the bus with me from Évreux whether she knew how to get to Condé. She talked about a bus that went as far as Breteuil, otherwise I could walk to Breteuil and from there it would take less than an hour to reach Condé. “You'll see, it's not that far. In two hours you'll be there.”

I was still wearing my short trousers, it was still below zero, there was snow, and I didn't have any boots. I wondered how Lena could possibly be in the Resistance, preparing tracts, handing them out, never getting caught . . . and yet she couldn't imagine I might need warm clothes for the trip from Paris to Condé-sur-Iton in the middle of January. The walk was a good deal longer than what the lady at the station had said; two hours after I left Verneuil I still hadn't gotten to Breteuil, and yet, in all that time walking and thinking, I couldn't find an answer to the puzzle of my mother's oversight.

In Breteuil, a sign indicated that Condé was four kilometers from there! It was almost dark. I sat at the side of the road, disheartened, but the cold penetrated so quickly that I completed this last stage of my adventure practically at a run. Ah! I saw a village which had to be Condé-sur-Iton. With chimneys, and smoke rising to the sky. This time I wasn't running, I think I was flying.

There was no one in the streets, so I knocked on the door of a house and asked where the Buissons lived. I had to go down the street, which was very steep, and right at the end, turn right. The village café was on the ground floor of the Buissons' house. I almost expected to be told that there was no one there by that name. But no, these people who were supposed to take me in and feed me and house me, they really did exist.

When I entered the warm house that smelled of soup and roast chicken, and I saw these people welcoming me with big smiles, and running to fetch me a thick sweater, shouting, “Poor little mite, he must have been freezing!” I was so overcome by a sense of well-being that I would have gladly left the house just to come back in again ten times over, so as never to forget that sensation.

I quickly felt at home with the Buisson family in Condé-sur-Iton. There was Olga, with her gentle round face, framed with very short black hair; Robert, her husband, short, round and blond, reeking of snuff, occasionally a bit gruff but never nasty; Paulette, their daughter, in her twenties, very pretty, with big serious eyes; Liliane, three years old, Paulette's little girl—the father had been taken prisoner by the Germans and no one knew what had become of him; and Mémé, Olga's mother, Paulette's grandmother and Liliane's great-grandmother. She was all wrinkled, almost deaf, but she laughed like a young schoolgirl with a hoarse voice.

My first evening was spent eating, becoming acquainted, eating some more, and settling into my bedroom . . . where I fell asleep in less than two minutes, thanks to the fatigue from the journey and the heat from a hot brick wrapped in a towel which Olga placed at my feet beneath the duvet. That first night I woke up several times. I thought about my adventures. I buried my face beneath the warm duvet. I could smell the chicken on my fingers. And I thought again about what Olga had said: “Your mother, Janine, is my cousin. I offered to take you in because I knew that she had a hard life in Paris with the six children and that you were at an age where you had to get a good meal inside you. We'll start practicing tomorrow. You have to learn to react in the right way when you hear the name Roger. The villagers have plenty of time to watch everyone and start to wonder about things. Your story has to be perfectly consistent.”

Saturday morning. I started my new life. I helped around the house, I brought in the firewood, they gave me newspapers to read . . . and, from time to time, someone said, “Roger,” naturally, without shouting, without placing too much stress on the name. It was only by evening that my reaction time began to seem natural. It was hard to lose such an ingrained habit in only a few days. But Olga never lost her patience and she was relentless with her “adaptation exercises.”

On the Monday they enrolled me at the village school. I wasn't in such a hurry to go, but Robert thought we shouldn't waste any time and that it would be good for me to make friends. Olga taught me how to lie (something that would prove useful on numerous occasions during the war): never anticipate people, or start spouting everything you've learned by heart unless it's in answer to a question. You had to have all your answers ready, but only get them out when it was necessary.

The day I started school I was a perfect Roger Binet. I had to introduce myself to the class. I said as little as possible: I'd come from Paris, we didn't have much to eat there, so I had come to stay with my Aunt Olga (who wasn't exactly my aunt, but as good as). No, I didn't miss my parents. Maybe one of my brothers, the youngest one. I told them quickly what life in Paris had been like since the beginning of the war.

Before long no one was interested in my previous life at all. I was Roger Binet who went to the village school in Condé-sur-Iton with the other local children, who lived with Olga and Robert, and who helped Olga from time to time, because in addition to looking after the café with Paulette, she worked as the mailman and she needed help delivering the mail by bicycle. And on Tuesdays, after school, she'd ride up the steep hill on her bike with a trailer at the back to go to the bakery in Breteuil and fetch the bread for everyone in Condé, in exchange for sheets of paper covered with the ration tickets all the clients of the café had given her. When Olga first asked me if I could help her with the mail and the bread delivery, I went all red and had to confess that I didn't know how to ride a bike.

“Never mind, I'll continue to take care of it. Maybe Robert can teach you?”

But Robert always had something better to do, or not do. In the end it was Arnold, who had come to see me on a surprise visit for a few days, who taught me. By the time he left, I was ready to take over from Olga.

They also asked me to go with Mémé on Thursdays to collect old dead branches in the park surrounding the old château. There were two châteaux in the little village of Condé-sur-Iton: the old one, which was from the twelfth century, where the “old count” lived, and the “new castle” from the seventeenth century, where the “young count” lived, and where the German garrison had been staying since the Occupation. I pulled the big wagon and sawed the wood, but Mémé was the one who chose the branches that were dead enough so the forester wouldn't mind if we took them. Thursday was my favorite day, because after the wood gathering I was allowed a glass of fermented cider along with the adults.

At school the teacher was called Gérard. There were twenty or so of us boys and, in another building, Marcelline, Gérard's wife, taught the twenty or so girls. In my class there were only four boys my age, who were only there half the time, because they had too much work at home or on the farm to come to school. Gérard was a colorful character, who knew a heap of things; he liked to talk with the children and preferred to let us find the solution rather than hand it to us on a silver platter. I never grumbled when it was time to leave for school. But what made me happiest of all in Condé was family life at home with the Buissons. I had my responsibilities, like everyone else, and sometimes I thought I had too many and I complained, but I had the impression that all of this was “real” life, that it was more like the normal life a kid my age would lead.

 

Olga was the communist in the Buisson household, and she took charge of my education in history and politics. Robert didn't give a damn, he preferred his rough red wine to politics. Olga admired the USSR.

“In the Soviet Union, it's not like here, where it's every man for himself. There, everyone works for the good of the country and the nation. One of their finest inventions is the kolkhoz. Have you ever heard of kolkhozes?”

“They're farms, right?”

“Collective farms. People work all together, and what they grow is redistributed. By bringing a lot of little farms together into one big one, they can buy huge machines, of the sort you don't see here, and that enables you to do the harvest much quicker and without any loss. One day, for sure, after the war, I want to go and visit the Soviet Union.”

“They say my father is there.”

“In the Red Army?”

There was a sudden commotion outside. The sound of someone banging on the barn door. Olga's face went tense. I hurried to the window of the café and parted the curtains discreetly, and murmured to Olga, “It's a German soldier.”

You could enter the café through the barn. Olga told me to open for him. The soldier came in, staggering, and hardly looking at us he said, “I'm thirsty! I want lemonade! Lemonade!”

“Not so loud, please. Come in first.
Ja, ja,
lemonade, it's coming.”

“How much? Can I pay with this?”

The soldier yanked off a medal that was sewn onto his coat.

“Well, no, we can't take that, you need money, francs!”

The soldier gave a shout then tossed his medal onto the floor and began to trample on it.

“
Scheisse!
Not even good enough for lemonade!”

Then he let out what sounded like a string of swear words in German. And collapsed on a chair, his head in his hands.

“You know why I have medal?”

“I suppose it was for bravery,” Olga replied quietly.

“We shoot French tank. Big tank. Five soldiers come out, they running everywhere. So I have orders to shoot with machine gun! Takatakatakatak. Me, I obeyed, they say ‘Fire!' so I fire. Takatakatakatak! Takatakatakatak! They all die.”

No one said anything. The silence seemed endless.

“Bastard! I am real bastard!”

He swallowed his glass of lemonade in one gulp. And asked for a second.

“I am going. But . . . I come back. Another day. Listen to English radio, BBC. In German. Please. Is possible?”

“All right.”

“I am Charlie.”

“And I am Olga. And this is my nephew, Roger.”

“Thank you, Olga, you are very kind.”

And we quietly got used to him, and he got used to us. He came two or three times a week, after the café had closed for the day. On those nights, the entire Buisson family listened to the radio in German with Charlie, the Austrian. He was kind, he brought presents, tools, things to eat for the family, shell fragments for me, all sorts of things that he'd picked up here and there on his patrols. I was one of the first to adopt him, and to look forward to his visits. Perhaps because I too was adopted. Olga and Mémé, too, were quickly won over. As for Robert, it took a while longer. The first few times, he stayed in a corner of the living room or went out of the house when Charlie arrived: “Right, I suppose we have to listen to the radio in that Boche language again!” But he eventually lowered his guard and now he often finished the evening sitting at the kitchen table with Charlie. They would share a bottle of red wine or calvados, sometimes in silence, sometimes insulting who knows who by mutual agreement.

 

One Sunday, Paulette came to invite me to the movies. She seemed in a hurry. I hadn't been in a long time, and I thought it was a great idea.

“What are we going to see?”

“I don't remember the title of the film, but it's supposed to be very good. Quick, take your bike, we have to hurry.”

Delighted, I went to get my bike. When we arrived at the cinema in Breteuil, Paulette rushed up to the box office.

“Oh, you know what, Roger, I don't think this is my sort of movie after all. Since I have a few things to do in town, I'll leave you here and come back for you when the movie's over. Is that okay?”

“Well, yes, but you'll miss the movie.”

“Oh, you'll tell me about it afterwards, that's all.”

That is how I was able to see
The Acrobat
, with Fernandel. And several other movies after that. Paulette didn't even pretend anymore that she wanted to go to the movies: she would buy me my ticket, I'd tell her the story afterwards, and that was enough for her. She always listened to my story very attentively. I knew I was a good storyteller, but it seemed to me that the pictures, the actors, and the music would still be better.

I might have been young, but I wasn't stupid: Paulette was taking me to the movies so she could see her lover in secret! After a few “trips to the movies” I was getting a pretty good idea what was going on. It just so happened that sometimes, when we were in Breteuil, we ran into Charlie, and he always made sure to give me a nice wave. But Paulette always looked the other way. Or seemed suddenly very interested in the pebbles on the path. Her reaction wasn't logical. I might not have known much about feelings, but I knew a lot about logic. When you run into someone by chance, someone that you know, you act surprised. And Paulette didn't act surprised. Even if you don't like someone very much, at least you're surprised to see them. And Paulette wasn't. So I concluded that she knew in advance that Charlie would be there. And that while I was at the movies, they were meeting. And I understood that I had to be fair and keep my mouth shut if I didn't want to spoil my trips to the movies.