Papa was more worried and didn’t seem to care much for Maman’s remedy. There’d been drinkers in his family, he told Jeanot with a serious look in his eyes. His older sister was a sequestered drunk. He’d dealt with intoxicated soldiers during the war, and had come to realize there was no greater danger to groups or individuals than someone incapable of holding his liquor.
Jeanot listened, but his head hurt and it was hard to pay attention.
There was a lot of whispering back and forth, with Mathilde for once taking Maman’s side. “A drink never hurt anyone,” she said, though she seldom drank herself. “Where I come from, you start the day with a little white wine, and it carries you through the worst weather. Everyone knows that. Leave the boy alone; there’s no harm done.”
By the time Jeanot felt well enough to stand, trundle to the bathroom, puke, dress and make his way to the street with Mathilde, it was nearly mid-afternoon. The school day was almost over, and though his eyes hurt from the sunlight, he felt the evening had, all in all, been a success.
Later, he helped his Oncle Répaud walk Soldat, the three-legged dog, ran an errand for his Tante Jacqueline, spent an hour in the cellar rearranging his magazines and covered three sheets of paper with doodles. He started a poem but couldn’t quite make it rhyme or move the way he imagined it should, so he gave that up. He wished he could be a poet like Minou Drouet, the 8-year-old genius who had recently been featured in Paris Match. It galled him that a girl could get that much recognition doing something he should be able to do. He was, after all, very good at placing words next to one another, not that it impressed anyone. When Minou Drouet did it, everybody noticed. Even his teacher at the école maternelle had said Minou was an enfant prodige, a one-of-a-kind and didn’t she wish she had students like Minou instead of a bunch of slow-witted children who couldn’t remember how to spell ‘Napoléon?’
Chapter 3
A dark intimidating corridor led to the kitchen and toilet. Often, Jeanot secretly peed in the bathtub to avoid going into that corridor, or he crossed his legs and held his breath.
At one end of the apartment were three rooms rented to Captain Walker, his pregnant wife, and their daughter, Trudy. They’d moved in after the end of the war. Grand-père Leopold had loaned the apartment to Jeanot’s parents shortly after their son’s birth and thought the modest rent the American family paid might help Jeanot’s family make ends meet. The Americans’ rooms were furnished with a mad mix of Grand-père’s most worn antiques: Louis XVI Bergères chairs painted red with scarlet upholstery, a sagging Art Nouveau sofa upholstered in fading velvet, and upright gas lamps poorly converted to provide electrical lighting.
Trudy fascinated Jeanot. She was six and he’d never seen a girl that looked even remotely like her. For one thing, she took a bath every single night, and the thought of that much hot water devoted to one small body boggled his mind. He took a bath twice a week usually following his two sisters, Madeleine and Françoise, when they came to spend the day and use the facilities. When it was his turn, the water was already grey and mucky with a ring of spent soap and grime around the tub.
Also, Trudy was blond. She was really, really blond, as if someone had painted her hair bright gold and the paint hadn’t dried yet. She always wore white, spoke only English and was a snob, ignoring him with studied disdain whenever he happened to be standing by the bathroom door as she came from her bath wrapped in a fluffy pink towel.
Once, he asked his Maman, whom he knew dyed her hair from mousy brown to Hollywood blonde, if Trudy dyed her hair too.
“Nobody in Paris has hair that yellow! It can’t be real!”
The announcement seemed to perplex his mother. “Vraiment? I don’t know. Maybe in America the sun is different. It does things to children’s hair. Ask your Papa.”
Jeanot never did. Hair dying, he was certain, was not a subject on which his Papa would have extensive knowledge.
Trudy’s father, the Captain, was a pale stout man with close set squinty eyes. Jeanot rarely saw Trudy’s mother. According to Papa, she was adjusting poorly to foreign lands, their people, foods, languages, and habits. Whenever Jeanot caught a glimpse of her, she looked feral and frightened. Once, turning a corner, Jeanot surprised her as she carried a load of hand laundry back to their rooms. The woman yelped something incomprehensible and dropped everything on the floor. Jeanot helped her gather the clothing and sheets, taking the opportunity to pocket a pair of Trudy’s panties for later inspection.
The American couple paid part of their rent by buying goods at the American PX for Jeanot’s parents. There were things at the PX rarely found in French stores or, if available, so expensive they belonged to the world of fantasy. Papa got shoes, big black squashers he kept meticulously shined, and Maman had a steady supply of Pall Mall cigarettes in royal red packs. There were boxes of Tide, Johnny Walker whiskey, Ivory soap, pancake mix that, water added, made somewhat edible crêpes, potatoes the size of small dogs and strange, tasteless red sausages served on buns so soft they might be cake. Jeanot got underwear with a slot to pee through and a toy Colt 45 with a black plastic belt and holster. Even Madeleine and Françoise got stuff from the PX: bras with reinforced cups, an accurate-to-the-nanosecond metronome for Madeleine, an Olivetti portable typewriter for Françoise who, barely seventeen, was heading off to England to train as a “bilingual secretary.” Jeanot understood that meant she could perform boring menial tasks in both French and English. The culture in Grande Bretagne was nothing like American culture, he’d been told, and didn’t interest Jeanot at all.
Jeanot had never actually been to the PX, so the mysterious market open only to US citizens became, in his imagination, everything France was not and America was—rich, modern, plentiful and inaccessible.
The family’s other major American connection was Papa’s automobile, an olive green 1941 DeSoto Series S-8 Custom Coupe that Papa bragged had once belonged to the cultural attaché of the Canadian Embassy.
The car dwarfed its Parisian counterparts, belched clouds of blue smoke, stank of gasoline, ran only on moderately sunny days, and menaced the rest of traffic. The brakes worked when pumped precisely four times in rapid succession. The blinkers did not blink, the tires were bald, and the clutch was worn and wheezed. To start the DeSoto in the winter, Papa would light a newspaper fire beneath the hood to warm the carburetor. The car was his joy and, by osmosis, that of Sergei Kharkov, the concierge.
Kharkov washed the car every Friday. Jeanot once helped him, lugging buckets of soapy water from the courtyard to the street.
“A magnificent car,” Kharkov told him as they were cleaning the wheels with soap and a stiff brush.
“Papa sometimes curses when he tries to start it, especially when it’s cold. He says bad words in English.”
The concierge nodded. “Well now, that makes perfect sense. Cursing in French at an English-speaking car serves no purpose at all.”
Jeanot thought Kharkov was pretty sharp. “Do you speak English, Monsieur Kharkov?”
“Of course,” said the concierge, and recited his favorite words. “Beaver coat, amber waves of grain, special skies, to be or not to be.” He paused, scrubbed. “I know a lot more, of course. But those are the words everyone must know in America.”
“Papa says you should also know, ‘Hello, I am lost, my name is Jeanot.’ But not in your case. You’d have to say, ‘My name is Monsieur Kharkov.’”
Then they dried the DeSoto’s hood and sides with a chamois cloth, scrubbed the bald tires, swept out the inside with a straw broom, polished the chrome and cleaned the windshield with a mixture of ammonia and soap.
In exchange for these services, Papa allowed the Russian to sit in the passenger seat while the car was parked, looking like a man impatiently waiting for something or someone important. Kharkov was not allowed to smoke his cigarettes in the car. It was a small sacrifice. Kharkov