In the Moon Page 4

  It was still warm and sunny during our tram rides home, but to my immense chagrin, Sabine always insisted we ride in the first car. I used to think this was because Sabine was afraid of falling out of the open-sided car, but of course I was the one in danger of falling off.

  Even so, I always loved the ride home. The little trolley wound its way through the gently undulating sand dunes, slowing considerably as it climbed the slight inclines, then barreling full speed down the other side of a dune. Where the open dunes ended, we plunged into the warm pine-scented forest of Hardelot.

  A mile farther on, as the trolley emerged from the pines, it ran past the luxurious Grand Hotel du Golf. This deluxe establishment had abundant flowerbeds brimming with color and lush green lawns on which hotel guests played croquet and enjoyed their afternoon tea or apéritifs under colorful beach umbrellas. The trolley didn’t stop at the hotel because the tram’s riders probably couldn’t afford to eat or stay there. Nor, for that matter, would any of the hotel’s guests have deigned to ride the trolley.

  By this time, the passengers—mostly young people who had spent a day at the beach and who had consumed a fair amount of wine since departing Hardelot—started to sing. The conductor got into the spirit and clanged the trolley’s bell at appropriate moments. The trolley rattled on, its wheels grinding and screeching in the curves.

  The clatter of the little trolley and the merriment of those on board created a noisy intrusion into the quiet of the late afternoon landscape we were traversing—now lush pastures and farmland. We skirted two small lakes mottled with lilies and dotted with anglers as they sat immobile on their diminutive campstools, deep in reverie. They didn’t wave or turn to look at us, fearing the slight movement might frighten away the fish.

  When the trolley approached an old castle in ruins, once a residence of Charlemagne, Sabine and I knew we had reached our stop in the village of Condette. We stepped off the trolley (a huge jump down for me) and waved to our fellow passengers as they continued on to the towns of Ponts-de-Briques and Boulogne.

  It was a short walk to our house, “Villa la Bècque,” up a street bordered by tall poplar trees and a small stream. The house was named after the stream that bordered the road we were on. Villa la Bècque was one of a series of summer houses my parents rented in this part of France every summer. The owner of our rented villa, an Englishman, was doing a tour of duty in India. He had built the house in the fashion of a true Indian bungalow. I was much impressed by the novelty of a one-story house and by its rudimentary, primitive look. It was so different from our house in Ville-d’Avray that had three stories, a mansard roof, and was very formal in appearance.

  Villa la Bècque was a long, narrow house laid out in a straight, unbroken line. Its nine rooms were reached by a corridor that ran the length of the house on its north side like the corridor in a railroad car. We could also move from one room to another on rainy days without getting wet by using the full-length covered terrace on the south side of the house.

  Each of the rooms had French doors that opened onto this wide terrace. The dining room table was moved to the terrace for meals on warm days, and a set of comfortable wicker lounge chairs on the terrace served as an outdoor drawing room.

  Mother pointed out a remarkable aspect of this house, which never ceased to enchant us when it rained. From every room of the house we could look up and see the rough-hewn, sloping rafters of the peaked roof, the lath over the rafters, and the underside of the orange-brown terra cotta tiles. When we had a good steady rain, there was a pleasant and soothing sound that was not the usual pitter-patter of raindrops. Mother explained that each tile, overhanging its neighbor, acted as the site for a small waterfall, and these hundreds of tiny, trickling waterfalls created a sound resembling a stream of tiny beads rolling across the gently sloped surface of a tea tray.

  Something else about this house which secured its place in my affections, was its proximity to the stream known as la Bècque. The stream ran about twenty feet from the house, parallel to its length, and flowed just fast enough so that, standing beside it, I could hear its quiet burble. Bordered with cress and bright green water weeds that swung gently back and forth in the current, this tiny river was not much wider than ten or twelve feet. I could play in it unattended because it was about knee-deep (for me) and had a flat, sandy bottom.

  I used to launch little boats—actually small sticks or little pieces of wood—from a spot near the east end of the house. I then dashed into the house through a door at that end, on down the long corridor and out the front door at the house’s west end, where I made a sharp right turn onto our entrance drive. The driveway crossed over a small bridge from which I could survey the finish line of my boat race. On warm days, it was more fun to go sploshing barefoot down the stream itself in hot pursuit of the boats. Either way, there was enough fun in it to keep me happy for hours. I remember being indignantly surprised upon discovering that a fancy little toy boat, intended for bath tub use and graced with the lines of a boat meant for speed, did no better in the race than the simple little sticks.

  At the end of the summer, the day came when the family had to return to Ville d’Avray. We left by car late in the afternoon, stopping on the way for dinner at a small country inn late in the evening. This stop provided me with my first vivid recollection of nighttime.

  I was probably sleepy when we left the restaurant after dinner, and Father carried me to the car in his arms. He stopped outside the restaurant to point out various stars to me. It was one of those black, moonless nights in the country where the air was so clear that the larger stars sparkled jewel-like against a sky luminous with the Milky Way. For a minute or two, I was transfixed as he stood talking softly to me, telling me the names of stars and constellations. He began walking slowly towards the car, perhaps still looking up at the stars, and suddenly, we were falling! Father had tripped over a drunk who was lying on the ground. Fortunately, neither of us was hurt.

  In the autumn of 1933, when I began to attend my first school, I was three and a half years old. I can still remember the fear and dread I experienced every day as I walked up the narrow pedestrian alley leading to the school.

  Our first walk to l’École de la rue Pradier (the Pradier Street School) was on a fine autumn afternoon. In an effort to calm my fears about what she called this new adventure, Mother was putting on airs of forced cheerfulness, which only added to my anxiety. When we entered the rue Pradier, the street where the school was supposed to be, she started looking for the house number. Both sides of the street had high stone walls, and street numbers were clearly marked beside each entrance on blue enamel plaques set into the masonry. It was soon clear that the number she was looking for was missing. We went up and down the street, looking at the numbers over and over again.

  Eventually, Mother noticed that an unobtrusive break in the wall occurred where the number she sought should have been. This opening vaguely suggested a pedestrian alley between two properties, but no sign or number indicated that a house might be at its far end. Nevertheless, she became convinced that this was where the school had to be.

  The narrow alley was bordered on both sides by those same high walls. Along one side of the alley, just over the wall, was a row of closely planted chestnut trees whose dense foliage completely obscured the sky above the alley. There was no light or a clearing at the end of this somber tunnel, which seemed to end in deep shade and darkness. Mother hesitated for some time and even expressed misgivings about entering so somber a passage. For my part, I was hoping it meant the school didn’t exist and that she would forget the whole thing.

  Just then, a gnarled old woman came tottering down the street, and Mother asked her about the school. “Ah yes, it’s down that alley, about two hundred meters on your right,” she replied, pointing to the break in the wall we had been contemplating.

  The alley was chilly and damp, and I was overpowered
by the musty smell of moss and mold. There was an eerie silence, a shutting out of noise by the moss-laden walls and the canopy of foliage above. I was struck by the muffled sounds of our footsteps on the thick mat of damp leaves covering the ground, and by the rapid pulse beat in my ears. I wondered who would hear us if we called for help.

  We walked what seemed to me an incredible distance before we finally reached a rusty, black metal gate set in the wall on our right. Mother tugged at the bell-pull beside it, and I heard the tinkling beyond the wall. An ominous quiet was followed by the sound of footsteps on gravel. When the gate opened, a cross-looking woman wearing a well-bleached denim apron confronted us. “Madame Lacoste vous attend,” (“Madame Lacoste awaits you,”) the woman said curtly, and led us across the small schoolyard to the entrance of a shed-like building, which turned out to be the school’s only classroom.

  Inside the drab, dimly lit classroom was an array of empty, dilapidated desks. Sitting at a large table at the far end of the room was a woman who glowered at us as we approached. She was Madame Lacoste who, after some terse discussion with Mother, enrolled me. Then, she abruptly told us that the autumn semester had already begun, that classes were held only in the morning, and that I should be brought back the following morning at nine o’clock.

  The next day, as Mother and I walked down the gloomy alley to the school, I was once again filled with the dread I had experienced the afternoon before. When the black gate opened, the woman in the denim apron seemed even surlier than she had been on our first visit. This time, she greeted us by announcing impatiently that we were late, and that Madame Lacoste did not like her class interrupted by late arrivals. Then she told Mother that she would take over and deliver me to Madame Lacoste. Classes ran till noon, at which time I should be picked up promptly, she snapped. Without further ceremony, she seized my hand and towed me rapidly across the yard and into the classroom.

  Madame Lacoste was at her desk in front of the class, and about thirty boys and girls were sitting in six rows of small desks. Each child wore a black smock that came to the knees, had full-length sleeves and, as a minor frivolity, was piped in red. The surly woman in the denim apron took one of these smocks from a row of hooks along the back wall, brusquely jammed my arms through the sleeves and buttoned up a long row of buttons at the back, tugging sharply to bring each button to its hole. I had never been treated so roughly and viewed all this with considerable dismay.

  The denim woman led me to an empty desk, sat me down, and opened a workbook that was already there. She picked up a plain nib pen lying in a special groove at the front of the desk and dipped it in an inkwell set into the desk. She then wrote on a blank line in the workbook an exact copy of some cursive text printed directly above it. “Do it like that,” she said, “Go on—do it—just copy the line above.” She took my hand and forced my fingers to close around the pen.

  Madame Lacoste was reading and seemed uninterested in what was going on in the room. The students were all busy scratching away in their notebooks with their pens and, except for a couple of them in my immediate vicinity, appeared to be unaware of my arrival. I soon learned why. If a student were caught looking around or talking, he or she was immediately slapped on the knuckles by Madame Lacoste, who descended on the student like a hawk on a field mouse. The slap was administered with the wide, flat surface of a hardwood ruler that she always seemed to have with her. She didn’t hit very hard, but hard enough to make the knuckles sting for a while. The first time I was struck, I broke into tears, so she immediately whacked me a second time and scolded me for being un pleurnicheur (a crybaby). No one cried in Madame Lacoste’s classroom; she couldn’t stand boys who cried, she explained.

  I dipped my pen and struggled to copy as I had been told. The results were dismal, but my interest picked up when I discovered the pen’s tendency to produce unexpected ink blobs on the paper. To my great delight, the blobs then ran or smudged. Soon, my fingers were turning black, which, of course, was the reason we wore black smocks.

  Eventually, Madame Lacoste came down the aisle looking at each workbook and praising a few that must have been far better looking than mine. The beneficiaries of this scarce praise were all girls. As for me and the other boys, she had only scorn and irate reprimands.

  Mother duly picked me up at noon and was appalled by the state of my hands. When we got home, she scrubbed them long and hard, first with strong soap and, when that failed, she used lemon juice and a pumice stone. Traces of ink stains would remain as badges of attendance for the duration of my stay at that school.

  The following morning, Mother managed to get me to the school on time. The denim woman’s tongue lashing the day before had made an impression on her. On this day, I didn’t miss recess as I had the day before. When it was time for the break, we filed out of the classroom in orderly fashion into the gloomy schoolyard. I now had a chance to satisfy my curiosity about a little building that was in the middle of the schoolyard and looked as if it might be a “play house.” As I approached the little house, its odor quickly removed all doubt as to its intended purpose.

  The line we had formed was led in a circle around the outhouse. We were told to join hands, to start singing “Alouette, gentille alouette,” and to continue skipping sideways in a “ring-around-the-outhouse” dance.

  “Who needs to go first?” Madame Lacoste cried out as we danced and sang. A small, skinny boy declared impatiently that he did and broke away from the circle to enter the outhouse. The ring re-formed, and we continued dancing around and around the outhouse as my classmates took turns dropping out of the circle to use the toilet and rejoining us once relieved. Eventually, it was my turn.

  I had already experienced the convenience of peeing behind a tree, and I had peed exultantly across and into rain puddles, but here I met defeat. Once inside this disgusting, foul-smelling place, I found I couldn’t go. The singing outside was a further cause for distraction from the chore at hand.

  My long delay inside the outhouse eventually caused a halt in the singing. An ominous period of silence was broken by the sound of an adult muttering outside, followed by loud banging on the door. Then the door opened, there being no lock on it. Madame Lacoste grabbed me by the collar of my smock and pulled me out just as I was finally achieving success in my original goal. There I stood, now unable to stop what I had worked so hard to start. The short flannel pants little boys wore in those days had no fly buttons (we just pulled up the short trouser leg), so at least I was not indecent, but the stream ran down my bare leg and into my sock and shoe.

  “Sal petit garçon—quel bébé—alors! Tu ne peux pas t’arretter?” (“You dirty little boy—what a baby—really! Can’t you control yourself?”) Madame Lacoste exclaimed, slapping me on my bare legs, taking due care to avoid the wet areas.

  Embarrassed beyond words, I ran to a corner of the schoolyard where I could hide behind a large tree, and there I stayed, wiping off my wet leg and sock with fallen chestnut leaves. I had been the last to volunteer, so the dancing circle had now disbanded. Before long, a boy came over to where I was still licking my wounded pride. It was Marcel, the oldest and largest boy in the school.

  “C’est une méchante—elle m’a fait ça aussi—elle est comme ça!” (“She’s a nasty one—she did that to me, too—that’s the way she is!”) he said, shrugging. “Come on!” He put his arm over my shoulder and gently led me back to the center of the yard where the rest of the kids were now playing. I soon recovered and joined in. Marcel’s compassion made a lasting impression on me.

  I was too embarrassed to tell Mother about this incident. Even so, I don’t think she was ever pleased or impressed by that school. However, it was the only private school nearby, and it was convenient, being about a mile from our house and thus within walking distance. This suited Mother just fine, as she had a strong belief in the need for a daily walk. Walking was something we had to do every day, no matter
what the weather was like. It rained a lot, often hard, but that didn’t deter her. We had raincoats, rubber boots and sou’wester rain hats to wear on such occasions.

  I was at l’École de la rue Pradier for about half a year. We learned to recognize and use some of the letters of the alphabet so that we could read and write a few words in cursive. We learned to count up to nine and to do sums of two numbers, as well as to multiply two numbers, but we were limited to answers that were no greater than nine. The numbers were printed large enough on the page so that we could color them with crayons. After a month of coloring numbers, we wrote them in ink. Now the numbers had to have exactly the right form and be in the right place on the page and in neat columns when doing an addition. Gross or frivolous discrepancies from these rules would result in a knuckle rapping and a loud reprimand. In spite of the hardships involved, I enjoyed working with numbers and I awaited with anticipation our encounter with numbers higher than nine.

  The strangest thing they had us doing at that school was embroidery, and this activity became my eventual downfall. It was during an embroidering session that I somehow managed to sew my smock and embroidery material around a limb of the desk in which I was sitting. I have no idea how this came about, but the result was clear. At the end of the period, I found myself unable to stand up and leave my desk. “What have you done, you imbecile?” Madame Lacoste yelled at me, as she went for a pair of scissors to cut me free. I was trussed up like a fly in a spider web, and it took her some time to sort it out because she was determined not to cut my smock. All this time, she hurled verbal abuse at me and vigorously slapped me, either to punctuate some particularly vindictive imprecation or to stop any part of me that I had dared to move.

  When Mother arrived to pick me up, Madame Lacoste unburdened herself once more of her anger as she described my heinous crime. She declared crossly that she could not have such an unruly child in her school and that she was expelling me then and there.