I didn’t remain a pupil at the Jeanne d’Arc school for long. The schoolyard was black because it was paved with coal slag. And that black went perfectly with the bark and leaves of the plane trees.
One morning, during recess, the principal came up to me and said:
“I wish to see your mother. Tell her to come this afternoon, as soon as class resumes.”
As always, she spoke to me in cutting tones. She didn’t like me. What had I ever done to her?
When I left school at lunchtime, Snow White and my brother were waiting.
“You’re making a face,” said Snow White. “Something the matter?”
I asked if Annie was home. My one fear was that she hadn’t come back from Paris the night before.
As luck would have it, she had come home, but very late. She was still asleep in her room at the end of the hall, the one whose windows opened onto the garden.
“Go wake her up,” said Little Hélène, after I’d related that the school principal wanted to see my mother.
I knocked on the door to her room. She didn’t answer. The mysterious sentence we’d heard from Frede’s nephew crossed my mind: “Annie cried all night long at Carroll’s.” Yes, she was still asleep at noon because she’d spent all night crying at Carroll’s.
I turned the knob and pushed the door open, slowly. It was light in the room. Annie hadn’t drawn the curtains. She was stretched out on the large bed, all the way at the edge, and she could have fallen off at any moment. Why didn’t she lie in the middle of the bed? She was sleeping, her arm folded up on her shoulder, as if she were cold, and yet she was fully dressed. She hadn’t even removed her shoes or her old leather jacket. I gently shook her shoulder. She opened her eyes and looked at me, knitting her brow:
“Oh … It’s you, Patoche …”
She was pacing back and forth beneath the plane trees in the schoolyard, with the principal of the Jeanne d’Arc school. The principal had told me to wait for them in the yard while they talked. My schoolmates had gone back to class when the bell had rung at five minutes to two, and I watched them, there, behind the panes of glass, sitting at their desks, without me. I tried to hear what the two women were saying, but I didn’t dare go any nearer to them. Annie was wearing her old leather jacket over a man’s shirt.
And then she walked away from the principal and came up to me. The two of us went out through the little doorway cut into the wall, which led to Rue du Docteur-Dordaine.
“Poor Patoche … They’ve expelled you.”
I felt like crying, but when I looked up at her, I saw she was smiling. And that made me feel relieved.
“You’re a bad student … like me …”
Yes, I was relieved that she wouldn’t scold me, but all the same I was surprised that this event, which seemed so serious to me, made her smile.
“Don’t you fret, old Patoche … We’ll find you another school.”
I don’t think I was a worse student than anyone else. The principal of the Jeanne d’Arc school had no doubt gathered information about my family. She must have realized Annie was not my mother. Annie, Little Hélène, Mathilde, and even Snow White: curious family … She must have feared I’d set a poor example for my little schoolmates. What could she have had against us? First, Annie’s lie. It must have caught the principal’s attention right from the get-go: Annie looked younger than her age, and it might have been better if she’d claimed to be my older sister. And then her worn leather jacket and especially those faded blue jeans, which were so unusual at the time … Nothing to hold against Mathilde: a typical old woman, with her dark clothes, corsage, cameo, and Nîmes accent. On the other hand, Little Hélène sometimes dressed strangely when she took us to Mass or the village shops: riding breeches with boots, blouses with puffy sleeves drawn tight at the wrists, black ski pants, or even a bolero jacket encrusted with mother-of-pearl … You could tell what her former occupation had been. And yet, the news dealer and the baker seemed fond of her, and always addressed her with respect:
“Good afternoon, Mademoiselle Toch … Good-bye, Mademoiselle Toch … What shall it be for Mademoiselle Toch today …?”
And what could one hold against Snow White? Her silence, black bun, and transparent eyes commanded respect. The principal of the Jeanne d’Arc school surely wondered why that girl came to fetch me after school, instead of my mother; and why I didn’t just go home by myself, like my other little friends. She must have thought we were rich.
Who knows? All the principal had to do was lay eyes on Annie for her to distrust us. Even I, one evening, had overheard a few bits of conversation between Little Hélène and Mathilde. Annie hadn’t got back from Paris yet in her 4CV and Mathilde seemed anxious.
“I wouldn’t put anything past her,” Mathilde had said, looking pensive. “You know as well as I do what a hothead she is, Linou.”
“She wouldn’t do anything really serious,” Little Hélène had said.
Mathilde had remained silent a moment, then said:
“You know, Linou, you keep some mighty peculiar company …”
Little Hélène’s face had grown hard.
“Peculiar? What’s that supposed to mean, Thilda?”
She’d spoken in a harsh voice I’d never heard from her before.
“Don’t get mad, Linou,” Mathilde had said, sounding scared and docile.
This was not the same woman who called me “blissful idiot.”
As of that moment, I realized that Annie, during her absences, did not always spend her time crying all night long at Carroll’s. She might have been doing something really serious. Later, when I asked what had happened, they told me, “Something very serious,” and it was like an echo of the sentence I’d previously heard. But that evening, the expression “hothead” was what worried me. Whenever I looked at Annie’s face, all I saw was affection. Could there have been a hothead lurking behind those limpid eyes and that smile?
I was now a pupil at the town public school, a bit farther away than Jeanne d’Arc. You had to follow Rue du Docteur-Dordaine to the end and cross the road that descended toward the town hall and the grade crossing. A large iron double gate led to the recess yard.
Here, too, we wore gray smocks, but the yard wasn’t paved with slag. It was just dirt, plain and simple. The teacher liked me and every morning asked me to read a poem to the class. One day, Little Hélène came to fetch me, instead of Snow White. She was wearing her riding breeches, boots, and a jacket that I called her “cowboy jacket.” She shook the teacher’s hand and told him she was my aunt.
“Your nephew reads poetry very well,” the teacher had said.
I always read the same one, the one my brother and I knew by heart:
Oh how many sailors, how many captains …
I had some good friends in that class: the son of the florist on Rue du Docteur-Dordaine; the pharmacist’s son, and I remember the morning when we learned his father had hanged himself; the son of the baker at the Food Hamlet, whose sister was my age and had blond, curly hair that fell to her ankles.
Often Snow White didn’t come to fetch me: she knew I’d come home with the florist’s son, whose house was next door to ours. When school got out, on afternoons when we didn’t have any homework, a group of us would go to the other end of town, past the chateau and the train station, all the way to the large water mill, on the banks of the Bièvre. It was still operational, and yet it looked dilapidated and abandoned. On Thursdays when Frede’s nephew wasn’t there, I’d bring my brother. It was an adventure we had to keep secret. We slipped through the gap in the surrounding wall and sat on the ground, side by side. The huge wheel turned round and round. We could hear the rumbling of a motor and the roar of the waterfall. It felt cool here, and it smelled like water and wet grass. The huge wheel gleaming in the half-darkness frightened us a bit, but we couldn’t help watching it turn, sitting side by side, arms hugging our knees.