Ignorance (19 page)

The pink brocade sofas were fat and plush. Cosy armfuls you’d call them if they were girls. They lolled about the room sleepily, brazen and half-bare, their covering tasselled shawls, gypsy-bright, slipped to the floor. I flung the shawls back over their tight upholstery, smoothing the purple folds scattered with crimson poppies, straightened their lacy antimacassars, plumped up their yellow silk cushions, pulled their gilt fringes straight. Sprawling in the white sunlight the seats and divans looked tawdry and tired. They didn’t like mornings. They blinked and yawned. I half-lowered the blinds, so that you wouldn’t notice the armrests’ worn patches and frayed edges. I coaxed footstools into tête-à-têtes, drew armchairs into friendly groups, patted fashion magazines into place near the radiogram. The sofas nudged up against each other and settled down.

I descended once more to the basement and rummaged about my working and sleeping quarters. My whitewashed room off the kitchen, little more than a windowless cupboard, seemed clean enough. A crucifix, threaded with a spray of palm, hung over the narrow bed. I unhooked it and threw it into a corner. I dumped my basket on the blue blanket serving as counterpane, pulled out my nightdress and placed it underneath the thin pillow. No chest of drawers, so I left my changes of underwear in the basket, and hung it on the back of the door. In the chilly kitchen I riddled the range, blew on the embers, put on another log, boiled water, made coffee in a long-handled metal pot. No milk anywhere to be seen. I poured myself a cup of coffee, found a heel of bread, sat down at the kitchen table, propping my feet on a second chair. I allowed myself to think about Maman for just five minutes. I poured the
patronne
a cup of coffee, put it on a tray and carried it upstairs.

On the small first landing a door stood open. Her voice called me: enter. A lamp-lit room. Pictures on the walls of curly-haired little girls playing with kittens and puppies. The drawn-down blinds fastened in the smell, choking and sweet, of violet face powder, violet scent. Seated, taking out her curl-pins, at her dressing table edged by muslin flounces, she was still only halfway between night and day. The bed the same, its tumbled pink sheets not yet put straight. Night-time at noon. Falling asleep at breakfast time. I soon discovered my role in the house: to connect night and day, darkness and light; for people who’d somewhat lost their way. A small brandy at six a.m.? Certainly. A footbath at four in the afternoon? Of course. Massage your shoulders at lunchtime? All right.

The
patronne
liked the way I found my way about and got on with my work without needing her to stand over me, give me orders. After a couple of days, watching me upend a kitchen chair and dust underneath it, she said: your mother’s trained you well. She made her sound like a boss in a uniform, not like my mother, who couldn’t stand the scratch of wool next to her skin, who could recite the alphabet backwards, who told me the names of stars. Who’d snatch my man and dance the polka with him. Sometimes, before going to bed in my cupboard-sized room in the
patronne
’s house, I kicked my mother’s boots, which stood on guard by the door. Sometimes I patted them. Around the house I wore canvas slippers, cast-offs of the
patronne
’s. The boots waited; ready. As long as they stayed in place I’d be all right. I tied their laces together in a bow. I was one boot and my mother the other.

After that first week’s trial the
patronne
took me on. I didn’t tell her the trial worked both ways. As an employer she’d do. I saw how to manage her. I learned what she liked, then provided it. Bathwater, sprinkled with gritty lavender crystals melting to slush, at just the right temperature. Hot coffee in her favourite green and gold cup. Sheets well aired, properly tucked in, pulled taut. Clean stockings dangling ready over the back of a chair.

On my first afternoon in the house I met the four girls who worked there. Puffy-eyed, yawning, tangle-haired, they thumped into the kitchen for their late breakfast. They erupted: a burst of stale scent, a pattern of pink and blue. Their red-nailed fingers clutched the edges of cotton kimonos sprigged with azure flowers and dotted with rose butterflies. They shuffled in grubby fur-trimmed mules, growled for coffee and cigarettes. Scratching their heads, they grunted to each other. Give us a fag. No, you owe me one. Give us a light, then. One of them, a plump woman of forty or so, started fluffing out her hennaed hair, combing her fringe with her fingers. She blinked as I brought the pan of hot milk to the table. Who’s this chickychick? Another, younger one, with tired brown eyes, her mousy curls tied up with a length of green net, rubbed her nose. She said: the new skivvy. Fucking slow she is too. Leaning her elbow on the table she crooked her finger: where’s the butter? Skip to it, skinnyskiv! A third girl, with a flood of yellow hair, massaged her forehead, groaned with headache. After a shot of brandy in her coffee she perked up. The fourth, olive-skinned and black-eyed, with long, crinkly black hair, a wide mouth, sat silent.

I learned their routine. While I cleared away the dirty crockery and cleaned the range they would play cards, tell fortunes, poke grumbling fun at the clients, do each other’s hair, paint each other’s toenails. The blonde, milky-skinned and green-eyed, her thick frizz bushing over her shoulders, was the youngest; sixteen or so. The others created youth with wigs and make-up. At night, Madame turned the
salon
lights down low and the girls put on their fancy names: Desirée, Hortensia, Violetta, Pivoine. I peeped at them from the doorway. Decked in skimpy pastel crêpe de Chine slips, arms and legs bare, feet swinging high-heeled satin mules, eyelashes brushed black, mouths transformed to sharp red bows, they waited to be bought. Sugary sweeties on a confectioner’s shelves. The men paid, chose their bullseyes, their lollipops, took them upstairs.
Madame la patronne
, coiffed and corseted and rouged, wearing a high-necked pink georgette blouse and plain black satin skirt, pin-heeled black shoes, kept a businesslike eye on the goings-on. Ping! Her bell declared time was up. In 1940, when the Germans arrived, she gained extra customers and made extra money and swelled up with content.

Inside her establishment the girls tried to hide from the war. They lowered their eyelids like window-blinds, and blinked. They clutched each other, merged, like lengths of blackout stitched together. They became a sealed house, its eyes glued shut, which didn’t have to notice rows of trucks rumbling past, people being beaten up, posters appearing overnight depicting devils with hooked noses and pendulous lips, slobbering over fistfuls of banknotes. They got on with business as usual: men taking their trousers off and demanding service.

The
patronne
would send me out to queue for food. Outside a grocery shop, a bakery, a butcher’s, the lines of women waited. Waited. I crossed my arms and tucked my hands in my armpits, to warm them. I jiggled from foot to foot. I studied the bricks on the wall next to me, dark red veined with yellow and blue. Standing well back behind the press of people, I scratched at the edges of posters, lifted them, tugged them. The paper peeled away in jagged strips I screwed up and put in my pockets. The devil lost an eye, a thumb. The queue shuffled forward. Back at the house the crumpled paper came down to the basement with me and got stuffed into the range.

Sometimes, returning with the bread ration, my pockets plump with paper, I would make a detour to visit Émile. On the first occasion I hovered outside the garage until he saw me and came across the yard. Slender body in bulky overalls. Sharp features softened by his smile. Wiping his black, oily hands on a rag, he offered me just his wrist to shake. I’m finished with this in a couple of minutes. Want to come up and see my room? Inside the open kitchen door his landlady had her back to us. She lifted a pot lid and steam flew out. We slid past her, mounted the stairs. Lino with a worn pattern of red and blue squares. Both of us holding our boots in one hand. Émile’s darned grey woollen heels.

Émile sat on the bed and I on a wooden chair. He produced roll-ups and we smoked. The
patron
grows his own tobacco out in the back yard, he sells it to friends, and I get it cheap for keeping my mouth shut.

Harsh stuff, which made me want to cough and spit. Shreds of tobacco stuck on my lips. D’you like music? I like jazz. Émile had been to Paris once and heard jazz in a nightclub. He tried to whistle some bars of it for me, to give me a taste. The radio didn’t play jazz; only German tunes. In return, I told him about my attempts at drawing: would you sit for me? No way, Émile replied. He sprang up and walked around the room: I can’t sit still for too long! Come on, let’s go out. We crept back downstairs. Arm in arm we walked through the backstreets. Émile had a message to deliver.

Messages meant bundles small enough to slip into my bag: newspapers, pamphlets, small pocket-sized flyers, produced in someone’s basement. We rolled up the flyers as though they were cabbage leaves and slipped them into people’s shopping-baskets in food queues. We spread them out as though they were lost handkerchiefs and slid them behind the windscreen wipers of parked cars. We were correcting German propaganda; giving people the facts.

New facts punched in, winded me. All I could do was try to make sense of them.

One fact was the census being made of Jews. I knew my mother would refuse to sign up to it. In the night she shouted to me from far away: they’ll use this against us. She hid in her flat, as I hid in the
patronne
’s house. So far, my mother and I had got away with our identities as Catholics. In the night my mother whispered: for the moment. Then we’ll see.

My mother’s words combined to form a dream-telegram; I filled in what her dream-message did not say. Strips of white paper, printed with black type, pasted on to the pale slip, delivered a warning. You regarded it fearfully. You read it over and over again. You translated it, tried to make it mean what it did not, put it on the kitchen mantelpiece, fenced in behind iron candlesticks. It glared at you, crouching, ugly. Finally you permitted it to growl, to bark. It alerted you to the future: the police banging on your door in the middle of the night.

Another fact was having to live by German time, set our clocks by Berlin. I marked times and dates keenly, a way of grappling with the facts of the war. You pinned facts down by noting the date. The summer of 1939 had meant the first time that women and old people got the harvest in by themselves, with the men away fighting. June 1941 meant Hitler invading Russia. For Émile and his comrades, this brought new clarity, new urgency. For the house, it worked as an additional layer of felt, denying the possibility of more bad news. For my mother, a tight-lipped wariness as she read the flyers I brought home.

On my rare visits, she spoiled me with caresses, little attentions. She stitched me new petticoats from old pillowcases. She gave me one of her geraniums, grown from cuttings, for my room. Put it on your window sill, water it well, and it’ll have pink flowers. Lovely coral-pink.

I held the little green plant in its red earthenware pot, fingered the edge of a frilled, rounded leaf to release its harsh scent. I said: have you seen that man again? The one you were dancing with that time? She said: I bump into him sometimes, at the Fauchons’, when I visit them.

She smoothed the table top, brushing off crumbs of earth. She said: we’ve begun holding meetings there. We’re all in the same boat. We keep an eye out for each other.

I handed her the geranium: I haven’t got a window sill. Let alone a window. She pushed it back at me: so put it somewhere else!

We sat at her kitchen table and drank weak, re-boiled water smelling of the memory of coffee. She showed me the toy animals she was making for the Fauchon children from wool scraps: the parents don’t approve of me but at least now we talk more. She criticised Marie-Angèle: a great big girl like that, lolling around at home! She’s so lazy! She accepted the gifts I’d brought her: two little blue and yellow coffee cups from a junk shop, half a bar of soap stolen from the
patronne
.

I asked her: what kind of meetings with the Fauchons? She clicked her tongue. She said: political meetings, of course. As Jews, we need to resist, we need to be organised. She didn’t mention Monsieur Jacquotet again, and so neither did I. I wondered whether her group knew Émile’s. You hadn’t to ask. You’d be super stupid if you did.

All through the winter I worried about her; all through the new year. Worry scraped away at me: what would be the facts of 1942? Throughout the spring I waited for the moment when something decisive would happen, something that would force me to act. I was poised to recognise it: I didn’t know what it would be.

In May 1942 the
patronne
offered me a rise. Masked in cold cream, her hair still netted and pin-curled, purple wrapper tied with a red sash, she descended to the kitchen pretending to do a surprise check. Larder shelves scrubbed? Range taken to pieces, scraped free of grease, re-assembled? Her apparent nonchalance, as she prowled about, opening a jar of knife-cleaner, re-folding tea towels, alerted me. I went on swilling out wet soot from ashtrays, waited to see what she really wanted.

She sat down at the table, leaned her bulk sideways, fished in her pocket for cigarettes. She said: I wouldn’t say you’re particularly gifted at housework. I would say your gifts could lie in other directions. Her fat little starfish hands grasped the matchbox. She sucked, puffed, blew out the match. Lipstick from the night before leaked faint red stains into the fissures radiating from her mouth. She smoked thoughtfully. Was she going to sack me? My toes flexed inside my slippers. Ready to make a dash for it.