She was annoyed when I didn’t give her an answer.
‘I asked you a question, damn it! Are you stupid or what?’
‘Yes, that’s fine.’
When the doorbell rang, I slipped in between the heavy hanging fabrics with their smell of mothballs, while Mademoiselle Marcelle took the burgomaster through to the room at the back. She took his raincoat and rammed it against my nose.
‘I’m finding it more and more difficult getting hold of insulin, Monsieur Van der Mersch.’
‘Yes, times are hard . . .’
‘To be honest, I won’t be able to give you your injection next week. Shortages! Hold-ups! It’s all finished!’
‘My God . . . my diabetes . . .’
‘There’s nothing I can do, Sir. Unless . . .’
‘Unless what, Mademoiselle Marcelle? Tell me! I’ll do anything.’
‘Unless you give me some ration tickets. I could exchange them to get your medicine.’
‘That’s impossible,’ the burgomaster replied in a panicky voice, ‘I’m being watched . . . the local population has grown far too much in the last few weeks . . . and you know exactly why . . . I can’t ask for any more without attracting the attention of the Gestapo . . . it . . . it would have repercussions for us . . . for us all!’
‘Take this piece of cotton wool and press firmly. Harder than that!’
While she gave her curt instructions to the burgomaster, she came over towards me and whispered quickly and quietly between the cupboard doors, ‘Take his keys from his coat, the ones on the metal ring not the leather one.’
I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly. Did she sense that? She added between gritted teeth, ‘And get a move on, damn it!’
She went back to finish the burgomaster’s bandage while I fumbled in the dark to relieve him of his keys.
Then, after her visitor had left, she let me out of the cupboard, sent me down to the cellar and set off into the night.
Very early the following morning Father Pons came to bring us the news:
‘Action stations, Mademoiselle Marcelle, someone’s stolen the ration tickets from the town hall!’
She rubbed her hands together.
‘Really? How did they manage that?’
‘The looters forced the shutters open and broke a window.’
‘Goodness! Has the burgomaster been damaging his own buildings?’
‘What do you mean? That he stole . . .?’
‘No, I did. With his keys. But when I put them back in his letterbox this morning I felt sure he would fake a break-in so no one would suspect him. Here you are, Monsieur Pons, have this book of ration tickets. It’s yours.’
Although she was surly and incapable of smiling, Mademoiselle Marcelle’s eyes gleamed with delight.
She pushed me by the shoulders.
‘Go on! Off you go with Father Pons now!’
By the time my bag had been packed, my false papers gathered together, and the story of my invented life rehearsed again, it was lunchtime when I reached the school.
The Villa Jaune was like a giant cat nestled on the top of the hill. The stone paws of the front steps lead up to its mouth, a hallway once painted pink, and weary-looking sofas could pass for a dubious tongue. On the first floor two large bay windows, shaped like oval eyes, dominated the front of the building and stared down at what was going on in the courtyard, between the gate and the plane trees. Up on the roof, two dormer balconies bristling with cast iron were reminiscent of ears, and the refectory building curled round like a tail to the left-hand side.
There was nothing to explain why the place was known as the Villa Jaune, the Yellow Villa. A century of filth, rain, wear and children bouncing balls against the render had mottled and striped the cat’s fur so it was now more a dull tawny colour.
‘Welcome to the Villa Jaune, Joseph,’ said Father Pons. ‘From now on it will be your school and your home. There are three sorts of pupil: day boys who go home for lunch, day-boarders who stay for lunch, and boarders who live here. You’ll be a boarder: I’ll show you your bed and cupboard in the dormitory.’
I mused on those unfamiliar distinctions: day boys, day-boarders and boarders. I liked the fact that there wasn’t just an order but a hierarchy: from the summary pupil to the complete student, via half students. So I was going straight into the top class. Deprived of noble status in the last few days, I was happy to be granted this alternative distinction.
In the dormitory the whole business of seeing my cupboard went right to my head − I’d never had a cupboard of my own before. I gazed at its empty shelves and dreamed of all the treasures I would arrange on them, not really taking into account the fact that, for now, I had only two used tram tickets to put there.
‘Now I’m going to introduce you to your godfather. All boarders at the Villa Jaune are protected by one of the big boys. Rudy!’
Father Pons cried ‘Rudy’ several times without success. Prefects relayed the name in an echo. Then the other pupils. Eventually, after what seemed to me an unbearably long time and with the whole school turned upside-down, the boy by the name of Rudy appeared.
When he promised me a ‘big’ boy as a godfather Father Pons really meant it: Rudy went on for ever. He reached such a height he seemed to be hanging by a wire from the back of his shoulders: his arms and legs dangled in mid-air and his head wobbled, lolling forward heavily, weighed down by hair that looked too dark, too thick and too straight − apparently amazed to be there at all. He came over slowly, as if apologizing for his gigantic size, like a dinosaur casually saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’m very friendly, I only eat grass.’
‘Yes, Father?’ he said in a deep but muted voice.
‘Rudy, this is Joseph, your godson.’
‘Oh no, Father, that’s not a good idea.’
‘It’s not open to discussion.’
‘He looks a nice boy . . .’ Rudy mumbled. ‘He doesn’t deserve this.’
‘I’m asking you to show him round the school and teach him the rules.’
‘Me?’
‘With all the punishments you’ve had, I think you know them better than anyone else. When the second bell goes you can take your godson to the younger boys’ classroom.’
Father Pons slipped away. Rudy looked at me like a pile of logs he had to carry on his back, and heaved a sigh.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Joseph Bertin. I’m six. I was born in Anvers and my parents died of Spanish ’flu.’
He looked up at the ceiling in exasperation.
‘Don’t recite the whole thing – wait till you’re asked the questions if you want people to believe you.’
Annoyed by my blunder, I put the Comtesse de Sully’s advice into practice and went straight on to the attack: ‘Why don’t you want to be my godfather?’
‘Because I’m a liability. If there’s a pebble in the lentils, it’ll be on my plate. If a chair’s going to break, it’ll be the one I’m sitting on. If a plane falls out of the sky, it’ll land on me. I’m bad luck for me and bad luck for anyone else. The day I was born my father lost his job and my mother started crying. If you give me a plant to look after, it dies. If you lend me a bike, that’ll die too. I’m the kiss of death. When the stars look at me they shiver. And the moon hides behind a cloud. I’m an all-round disaster, a mistake, a catastrophe, bad luck on two legs, a real schlemazel.’
The more misery he piled on − with his voice ricocheting from deep to squeaky because of all the emotion − the more hysterically I laughed. In the end I asked, ‘Are there any Jews here?’
He stiffened. ‘Jews? At the Villa Jaune! None! Ever! Why do you ask?’
He grabbed me by the shoulders and stared at me.
‘Are you a Jew, Joseph?’
He peered at me harshly. I knew he was testing my composure. Beneath his severe expression there was a plea: ‘Lie well, please, give me a wonderful lie.’
‘No, I’m not a Jew.’
He relea
sed his grip, reassured.
‘Anyway,’ I went on, ‘I don’t even know what a Jew is.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘What do Jews look like, Rudy?’
‘Hook nose, bulbous eyes, heavy jowls, sticky-out ears.’
‘Apparently, they even have hooves instead of feet, and a tail.’
‘Have to look into that,’ said Rudy, apparently seriously. ‘Mind you, at the moment Jews are mainly hunted down and arrested. Just as well you’re not one, Joseph.’
‘And it’s just as well you’re not one, Rudy. But you should still avoid speaking Yiddish and saying schlemazel instead of unlucky.’
He winced. I smiled. We had each discovered the other’s secret; we were in it together from now on. To seal our agreement, he made me carry out a complicated routine with my fingers, palms and elbows, then spit on the ground.
‘Come and have a look round the Villa Jaune.’
Quite naturally he took my small hand in his big hot paw, as if we had always been brothers, and introduced me to the world in which I would spend the years to come.
‘But still,’ he muttered between his teeth, ‘I do look like a victim, don’t you think?’
‘If you learned to use a comb, it would change everything.’
‘But look at me! Have you seen what I look like? I’ve got feet like meat plates and great mitts for hands.’
‘That’s because they’ve grown before the rest of you, Rudy.’
‘I’m expanding, getting bigger! Just my luck to turn into a target!’
‘If you’re tall you make people feel safe,’ I suggested.
‘Really?’
‘And you get the girls.’
‘Really . . . still, you have to be a hell of a schlemazel to call yourself a schlemazel!’
‘It’s not good luck you need, Rudy, it’s a brain!’
And that was how our friendship began: I took my godfather under my wing from the start.
On the first Sunday, Father Pons summoned me to his office at nine o’clock in the morning.
‘Joseph, I’m very sorry but I’d like you to go to Mass with the other boarders.’
‘All right. Why are you sorry?’
‘Doesn’t it upset you? You’ll be going to a church, not a synagogue.’
I explained that my parents didn’t go to a synagogue, and that I suspected they didn’t even believe in God.
‘It doesn’t really matter,’ Father Pons concluded. ‘You can believe in what you like, the Jewish God, the God of the Christians or nothing at all, but here you need to behave like everyone else. We’re going down to the church in the village.’
‘Not the chapel at the end of the garden?’
‘It’s no longer in use, deconsecrated. Anyway, I want the people in the village to know all of my flock.’
I ran back to the dormitory to get ready. Why was I so excited about going to Mass? I probably felt there was a great advantage in becoming a Roman Catholic: it would protect me. Better, it would make me normal. Being Jewish meant my own parents couldn’t bring me up, my name was better off being replaced, and I constantly had to lie and control my emotions. So what was in it for me? I was very keen to become a little Catholic orphan.
We walked down to Chemlay in our blue cotton suits, in two files in descending order of height, stepping to the rhythm of a scout song. Outside each house we were greeted with kindly eyes, people smiled and gave us a friendly wave. We were part of what made Sunday special: Father Pons’s orphans.
Only Mademoiselle Marcelle, standing on the front step of her pharmacy, looked about ready to bite. When our priest, who was bringing up the rear, passed her she couldn’t help herself grumbling, ‘Going off to have their heads filled with rubbish! Go on, feed them on smoke! Give them a dose of opium! You think it’s good for them but drugs are poisonous − specially religion!’
‘Good morning, Mademoiselle Marcelle,’ replied Father Pons with a smile. ‘You’re at your loveliest when you’re angry, as every Sunday.’
Surprised by the compliment, she retreated furiously to her shop, pulling the door closed so quickly she almost broke the bell.
Our group trundled through the church porch with its disturbing sculptures, and then I saw the inside of a church for the first time.
Rudy had warned me that I had to dip my fingers in the font, make the sign of a cross over my chest, then perform a swift genuflection as I set off down the aisle. Led by those in front of me and jostled by those behind, I watched in terror as my turn drew closer. I was frightened that when I touched the holy water a voice full of rage would ring out round the walls, crying: ‘That child isn’t Christian! Get him out! He’s a Jew!’ Instead, the water quivered as I touched it, clung to my hand and ran, fresh and pure, along my fingers. Feeling encouraged, I concentrated on marking out a perfectly symmetrical cross over my torso, then flexed one knee in the same place my friends had, before going over to join them in our pew.
‘We are gathered here in the house of God,’ began a shrill voice. ‘Thank you, Lord, for allowing us into your house.’
I looked up: as houses go, it was quite a house! Not just anyone’s house! One with no doors or internal walls, with coloured windows that didn’t open, pillars that had no function at all, and arched ceilings. Why were the ceilings curved? And so high? And why weren’t there any lights hanging from them? And why had someone lit candles all round the priest when it was broad daylight? With a quick glance round I checked there were enough seats for all of us. But where was God going to sit? And why did all these people huddled on the stone floor of this house take up so little room? What was the point of all that space around us? Which bit of his house did God live in?
The walls started to vibrate and this rumbling became music: the organ was playing. The high notes tickled my ears and the low ones reverberated through my buttocks. The melody spread lushly, expansively through the building.
In a flash I understood perfectly: God was there. All around us and above us. He was the air quivering and singing with music, he was the air bouncing off the arches, the air pressing up into the dome. He was the air bathed in light from the coloured windows, the air that glowed and shimmered and smelt of myrrh, beeswax and lily nectar.
My heart was brimming and felt strong. I took great deep breaths of God, almost to the point of fainting.
The liturgy went on around me. I didn’t understand any of it but watched the ceremony with lazy fascination. When I made an effort to identify the words, their meaning was beyond my intellectual grasp. God was one person, then two − the Father and the Son − and sometimes three − the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Who was the Holy Spirit? A cousin? Sudden panic: there were four of him now! The parish priest of Chemlay had just added a woman, the Virgin Mary. Confused by the rapid multiplication of Gods, I gave up on this game of Happy Families and threw myself into the songs because I liked a good sing.
When the priest talked about handing out little round biscuits, I was about to join the queue but my friends held me back.
‘You’re not allowed to. You’re too young. You haven’t been confirmed.’
Although I was disappointed, I gave a sigh of relief: they hadn’t stopped me because I was a Jew so it obviously didn’t show.
When we got back to the Villa Jaune I ran to find Rudy and share my excitement with him. I had never been to the theatre or to a concert so I associated this Catholic celebration with the thrill of a performance. Rudy listened kindly then nodded his head.
‘But you haven’t seen the best of it . . .’
‘What’s that?’
He got up to take something from his cupboard and waved at me to follow him into the grounds. Sheltered from prying eyes under a chestnut tree, we sat cross-legged on the ground and he showed me what he was carrying.
It was a missal, bound in unbelievably soft leather, its pages edged in gold that seemed to refer back to the gold treasures on the altar, with silk bookmarks that remind
ed me of the priest’s green robes. He opened it and took out some beautiful cards, all bearing pictures of a woman: it was always the same woman although her features, her headdress and the colour of her eyes and hair varied. How could you tell it was the same person? From the glow of her forehead, her clear-eyed expression, her incredibly pale skin with a dusting of pink on the cheeks, the simplicity of her long, draped gown and her presence − dignified, dazzling, majestic.
‘Who is she?’
‘The Virgin Mary. The mother of Jesus. The wife of God.’
There was no doubt about it, she definitely had that divine essence. She was radiant. And it was contagious; even the card seemed less like cardboard than meringue, as brilliant white as whipped egg whites, and it was embossed with designs that gave a lacy quality to those delicate blues and ethereal pinks, pastel colours softer than clouds in the first tickle of dawn.
‘Do you think it’s gold?’
‘Of course.’
I ran my finger over and over the precious-looking crown around that peaceful face. I was touching gold, stroking Mary’s headdress. And the mother of God was allowing me to do it.
Without warning, my eyes filled with tears and I let myself slide to the ground. Rudy did too. We cried softly, holding our communion cards to our hearts. We were each thinking of our own mother. Where was she? Was she as serene as the Virgin Mary at that moment? Was her face lit up with the love that had leaned over us a thousand times and that we recognized in these cards, or was it twisted with sorrow, fear or despair?
I started singing my mother’s lullaby quietly to myself, gazing up at the sky through the branches. Rudy’s hoarse voice joined mine, two octaves below me. That was how Father Pons found us, two children singing a Yiddish rhyme and crying over naïve images of the Virgin Mary.
Sensing the man’s presence, Rudy fled. At fifteen he was even more afraid of being ridiculed than I was. Father Pons came and sat down beside me.
‘You’re not too unhappy here, are you?’
‘No, Father.’
I gulped back my tears, wanting to please him.
‘I really enjoyed Mass,’ I said. ‘And I’ll be happy to go to catechism this week.’