Revolution Baby (20 page)

As I came nearer to the farm, I could hear Monsieur Biniaux shouting. “Lazybones! Good-for-nothing! Who sent me such a fucking lazy kid!” He was shouting so loud I thought his voice would break. And then there was the sound of a slap, then another, and I heard little Louis cry out. I had a huge knot in my stomach, I didn't know what to do, I didn't dare go and see what was happening, but I couldn't walk away again either as if nothing had happened.

“What are you doing here?”

It was Madame Biniaux. I turned around. She was giving me a hard look, then motioned to me to go into the house. I followed her inside, sat down at the table, and started eating. Louis came in when I had almost finished. His eyes were red, and he had trouble walking. He remained on his feet to eat his crust of dry bread.

 

The very next day I wrote to my mother and told her what was happening. I explained to her that I was worried about Louis, and that I didn't think he could survive an entire summer like that.

I went on working. And Monsieur Biniaux went on hitting little Louis. When I managed to avoid the farmers' vigilant gaze, I would hide a piece of bread or cake in my pocket, and give it to Louis in the evening, in our room. He still didn't talk to me, or smile, but when he looked at me he seemed a bit less fearful.

One day, Madame Biniaux sent me to pick fruit from the tall cherry tree that grew on the side of the hill. She gave me five baskets to fill. Once I was up in the tree, I took my time, eating at least as many cherries as I put in the basket. Suddenly I heard the buzz of an airplane engine. And it was coming closer, getting louder and louder. It was hedge hopping just above the hill. It was an English plane. Farther away, I saw a train stopped in its tracks. The plane flew over a first time, went away, made a circle and flew back over the train. And the same thing all over again: a second circle, and then a third. Meanwhile, the railway men left the train and ran to hide in the woods. Here came the plane a fourth time and then . . . TARATARATATA TARATARATATA! And all hell broke loose. The train was filled with ammunition. I stayed perched in my tree watching the fireworks. After I went back to the farm, for a long time I could still hear the carriages exploding one after the other. And I got told off for having taken too long to pick not enough cherries.

 

Roughly a week later, when I came back from the fields I found Lise with little Louis clinging to her while she spoke with Madame Biniaux. When Lise saw me, she gestured to me to come as quickly as possible.

“Go up to the room with Louis. And pack your bags, quickly!”

I didn't ask any questions, but I realized this was because of my letter. I stuffed all my belongings into my suitcase, and Louis put his into a big burlap bag. Then we hurried back down the stairs. Madame Biniaux seemed very annoyed.

“You can explain the situation to your husband when he comes back,” Lise told her. “And don't expect to be taking in any more children. That's finished. Come on, boys, we're leaving.”

 

 

 

I was still in the Champagne region. Lise took me to stay with one of her cousins, who lived in a village called Mont-Saint-Père, then she went away again with little Louis. My new family, the Brissons, included Albert, the father—who was also known as Albert the Pig, because everyone came to him if there was a pig to be slaughtered—Yvonne, the mother, and their two daughters, Isabel and Claudine. At a rough guess, the girls were almost adult. I had a simple life there: I worked a few hours a day, depending on what there was to do, and after that I went wherever I liked and filled the time as I pleased. After my stay with the Biniauxes, it was like being at a holiday resort.

The Jansons, our neighbors, also had two daughters. A grown-up one who was friends with the Brisson girls, and another one, Suzanne, who was my age . . . and who seemed delighted by my arrival. Every time I ran into her, she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. Initially she didn't talk to me. But very soon she began to ask me about myself, and then started talking about her own life. She introduced me to other young people, took me on a tour of the village and the surroundings. I thought that for a girl she was actually rather nice, and she even knew almost as much as I did about plants and animals. One day she came and knocked on the door.

“Hello, Roger! How are you? Say, my sister and her friend are going to the movies, and my parents are forcing me to go with them. I don't really feel like acting the chaperone all evening, so I thought that, since you told me once that you really liked the movies, so I thought that, even though I have to leave in a few minutes, maybe you—”

“I'm coming.”

Suzanne hadn't been talking for more than five seconds, and when I agreed, the little pink circles on her cheeks spread to her entire face.

On the way there, I didn't know where to look. Suzanne's sister and her “friend” didn't stop cuddling, and kissing on the mouth, and putting their hands all over each other. I was fascinated, I really would have liked to watch them, and I also wanted to learn something about what you are supposed to do with girls, but I felt horribly embarrassed, and I was afraid I might have a physiological reaction and Suzanne would notice. And she kept talking and talking and talking and looking everywhere except at her sister.

Once we were at the cinema, Marguerite, the older sister, made it clear to us that we had to sit as far away as possible from her and her boyfriend. Which was a relief to me, that way I could concentrate on the film.

How wrong I was. As soon as the film began, Suzanne moved closer to me, just a bit, and then a bit more . . . I tried to act naturally, but I wondered whether I should just let her do what she was doing or take an active part. No sooner had I started deliberating than her face was up against mine and a hot tongue was making its way between my lips. I couldn't decide whether I liked it, but I tried to respond as best I could with my own tongue to the movements of this moist muscle of Suzanne's. I concentrated very hard to stay calm. And to think quickly. I came to the conclusion that maybe it would be all right to put my hand on her thigh. I started just above the knee then gradually moved up . . . Darn, my mistake, she pushed my hand away. I was ill at ease, so I withdrew a bit . . . but then Suzanne grabbed my hand and shoved it under her skirt! Now I was in foreign territory. I touched the skin on her thigh a little bit, but I could tell from the way she was moving her hips that Suzanne would like for me to explore further. I was worried about what I might find there. But, oh well, all's fair in love and war! I shoved my hand up further. She moaned, but she didn't push me away. I went on, trying to gauge her reaction so I could analyze the relevance of my gestures. I touched the edge of her underpants. She went on making little moaning sounds and squeezing closer and closer to me.

I didn't get to see any of the film . . . and it took me a few minutes before I dared stand up when it was time to leave the cinema. Once we were outdoors, Suzanne looked at me with big languorous eyes that filled me with immense pride. I felt like I'd come off not too badly, and I had every intention of finding another opportunity, as soon as possible, to perfect my new talent.

 

Two days later I was on my way home with two bottles of milk I'd been sent to fetch at the Maugout farm when I ran into Suzanne. She looked at me, then averted her eyes and walked on without saying a thing. I stood still, not knowing what to do, and suddenly I remembered Rolande, how upon my arrival at the holiday camp she had treated me with indifference, and how I had later regretted my failure to insist. So I went after Suzanne.

“Hey! Suzanne, are you busy? I only have two or three things left to do, and after that I'm free. We could go to the beach. Would you like that?”

“Well, uh, I don't know. Well, all right, yes, why not.”

I would have preferred a more enthusiastic reaction, but never mind, I'd have to make do with a lukewarm “yes.”

At the beach, on the riverbank, I suddenly felt ill at ease. I realized we would not be able to reproduce the events from the dark cinema here, but I tried to sit near her, so that our thighs touched. But every time, she moved away. I had to change my strategy. I tried to find a topic of conversation that would interest her, thinking that this might make it easier for me to inch my way closer to her, subtly.

“Have I ever told you that I know how to talk to animals?”

She gave me a funny look, as if she had just found out that I was a complete idiot.

“Well, after a fashion . . . in fact, when I was little . . . ”

I stopped short. I couldn't go telling her about how I had just arrived in a French orphanage and only spoke Polish! This was the first time I had ever ventured onto such thin ice.

“Well, uh, it was just that animals always came up to me, I even looked after an owl, I had this sort of gift, and the kids in my neighborhood said that I knew how to speak animal language.”

“That's nice.”

Phew, that was a close call. I would have to learn not to let girls make me lose my concentration. But she didn't seem impressed. While I was hunting for something else to talk about, a detachment of German soldiers showed up, all carrying bath towels. It wasn't unusual for German soldiers to come and cool off in the river, and nobody paid any attention to their presence. Suzanne stood up.

“Well, since we're not swimming, I'm going home.”

Was that what she wanted, to go swimming? Why didn't I think of it? Both of us in the water, in our bathing suits, side by side. But why hadn't she said anything? I was disheartened by my lack of know-how with girls. Suzanne had already left, and I couldn't decide whether to follow her or not. Finally, I stood up and got ready to go back to the village. That was when I noticed that the sound of airplanes I had heard in the distance earlier was getting louder and louder. I could make out a squadron of English planes, those famous Black Widows with two fuselages. Someone shouted, “Take cover, quickly, they're going to shoot the Germans!”

I rushed over to a ditch, where I curled up in as small a ball as possible. The crackling began. It was raining all around me. After a while, I realized it was the sound of cartridges falling. I had enough experience of the war to know that if the cartridges were falling here, it meant they were shooting at something farther on. So I stood up to see what was going on. And then, suddenly, it was horrible, terrible. I was stinging, burning all over my body! I looked around and saw that in my panic I hadn't noticed that I'd found refuge in a field of nettles . . . in my bathing suit!

I hurled myself into the river to cool off my body, then quickly forgot my physical discomfort because I saw the most amazing spectacle, courtesy of the Royal Air Force: they were bombarding a train going by just on the other side of the Marne.

 

Toward the end of the summer Albert requisitioned me, along with the entire family and several neighbors whose pigs he had slaughtered during the year, to harvest the fields at the bottom of the hill by the river. No more holiday resort! The first days, we had to make sheaves with the wheat Albert had reaped and place them in the haystacks to keep them from rotting in case it rained. Then we had to gather the sheaves: you stabbed one with a pitchfork, got up your momentum, thrust it into the cart, and again, stab, momentum, thrust, and so on. By the end of the day, I was exhausted.

Once the harvest was over it was time to say goodbye—I had to go back to my lycée. I was sad to leave Mont-Saint-Père and the Brisson family, and disappointed not to have renewed my experience at the movies with Suzanne, but I was eager to get back to Paris, where I had every intention of finding an opportunity to put what I had learned about girls into practice.

I picked up my life exactly where I had left it. I was in the fifth class, at the Collège Jean-Baptiste-Say, and I was reunited with all my friends from the previous year. I also settled back into my usual habits at Francine and Michel's. So much stability was almost destabilizing. But you get used to everything at that age, even routine.

I had a new friend, Maciek. He took the same route as me, morning and evening. One day I suggested we go to the movies. He had never been before and he came out of this first session with the shining eyes of a child who's just had a trip in a hot air balloon. I became his official companion for outings to the movies and whenever he had a bit of pocket money he would grab me by the sleeve and beg me to go with him.

Maciek was the son of Polish peasants who had come to settle in France shortly before the war. Sometimes he would talk to me, rolling his r's, about his life in the Polish countryside, about the horses he used to look after when he was little, and the mountains with their snowy peaks, and cold beet soup and kielbasa. And there was I, Roger Binet, having to pretend I had never heard of any of that, and didn't know a thing about Slavic customs. It wasn't a very big lie, because other than the few words I still knew of the animal language (
tak, nie, gówno
and
królik
) and two or three very vague but pleasant memories of Hugo and Fruzia, I didn't remember much about the country of my early childhood. Since leaving Poland with Lena, I had been to so many different places, lived so many different lives, that my Polish period seemed almost unreal to me. But I liked to listen to Maciek talking about his past in Poland, and he was really happy to tell me about it, because I was the only one of his friends who was interested.

That year, the favorite teacher of almost all the children in the fifth class was the Spanish teacher. He was a very tall man with incredibly long arms, and he often came in late. To start the class, he always got our attention by teaching us a new “bad word” in Spanish, something he took very seriously. Therefore,
joder, puta, hostia, cojones, cabrón
and
puñetas
were the first words I learned in that language, and years later they were more or less all that remained. Without having to be told, all the children understood the importance of discretion with regard to this very unorthodox introduction to the language.