The Restless. Gerty Dambury

us!

      We watch her walk back and forth between the cupboard and her desk. She empties the cupboard calmly and puts all the work we’ve done from October to May on top of her desk. Our herb collection, all those colored rocks and birds’ feathers from our lessons about nature, and the yellowed breadfruit leaves we designed, even the makeshift paper cubes we made and got graded on. (Do you remember how much time I spent in our courtyard, Papa, bent over the blue table tearing up paper because I couldn’t figure out how to make that cube?) And odds and ends of embroidery she made us glue onto white paper: the chain stitch, the chevron stitch, the feather stitch, the herring stitch, the overcast stitch, and—the hardest of them all—the ladder hem.

      Even Mama said to me, “Soon you’ll be able to embroider my sheets.”

      Our teacher spreads out our whole year on her desk: rolls of tracing paper, sheets of bright Canson drawing paper—all the colors you can think of—stickers that have escaped from their package and created a little trail of colored spots between the cupboard and the desk. We watch them fall without moving a muscle; no one picks up the stickers. We’ve decided to let her handle this sudden departure all on her own.

      “Oh yes, there’s this too,” she says.

      And she hands us back our plastic corks, the ones we’d recycled from the Coeur Volant wine bottles. We were supposed to cut the corks in two and keep the fat part to cover it with wool for the table runners we were making.

      “Sunday is Mother’s Day. You should try to finish your runners. I’ll give these to you. You should use your free time on Thursday to finish the project.”

      We don’t say anything.

      The bell rings.

      “Make sure you pull the yarn tight, and don’t leave any space. You shouldn’t be able to see the plastic. And make sure you get your report cards signed. See you on Friday, children.”

      And we say nothing at all.

      It seems everybody already knows she’s leaving. The concierge with her cake; Madame Desravins, who tried to make us feel better; Madame Gaspésie, the principal. Everybody.

      But nobody is telling us why she has to leave. How can we find out why she’s leaving and where she’s going? Maybe she’ll tell us on Friday.

      When we go past the concierge’s loggia, Madame Parize shouts out, “How are you children doing?”

      Somebody insults her. “Ou two makrèl, Parize!”

      And then we escape, crossing rue Duplessis as fast as we can, right in the middle of traffic. We run until we get to La Place de la Victoire.

      We’ve changed; we know we’re not the same little girls. We would never have done this before: insult the concierge, tell her to mind her own business, and run wild. Like cattle set loose on the savanna. That’s what Madame Ladal always warned us about: “Don’t start running in the street, like cattle set loose on the savanna.”

      May 24, 1967. Remember that date, Papa, because that was when Madame Ladal’s good students, the best second-grade class in the Dubouchage Elementary School, ran across La Place de la Victoire like a bunch of crazed animals while Madame Parize went in search of the principal, yelling the whole time, “Who said that? Who said that? I’m telling the principal.”

      Rushing into the streets, we don’t wait for our teacher; we don’t carry her bag right up to her pretty wooden house on La Place, a house with gingerbread cutouts all around the roof.

      Normally, we walk a little ahead of her. We hurry ahead and then wait for her in front of her door. This time, since we didn’t wait, we don’t stop. And she isn’t following us like she normally does, a few feet behind with the other teachers who talk nonstop, while she listens in silence, smiling.

      She’s not with the other teachers.

      Maybe she’s no longer part of the teaching corps at Dubouchage Elementary. Maybe she’s already moved elsewhere in her head, already turned her back on us. Maybe she isn’t worried about us at all.

      So we run across La Place like mad cows, and she doesn’t even give a darn. (See, Papa, I said darn like you told me to, not damn!) Maybe she doesn’t give a darn so much that she doesn’t even see all the men who’re at La Place, many more than are normally gathered at “the senate,” as Émile calls it. That term makes Mama laugh, but you get all riled up, Papa. You think it’s stupid to call their gathering the senate. You say, “The senate is serious business.”

      But a senate on La Place de la Victoire, where men discuss problems or talk about sports, really does exist. And when we leave school on Wednesday, there are lots of people there. Old men and young ones too.

      Every afternoon, as a rule, young men flirt with all the girls. “Psittent, what a beauty!” And they wink at us. But today at the senate everybody is really serious. No winks, no “psitt,” no “Ay!? Mi bel ti moun!”

      Everything is upside down.

      Marlyse, the Jehovah’s Witness, says, “Joy has withered away, away from the sons of men.”

      And just like every time she says that, we burst into laughter.

      9.

      Let me tell you how the first suit the child’s father ever made got him involved with the communists, even if he didn’t plan it that way. And why he stayed, even if you’d never think he would, and even if he never attended the big meetings at the Mutualité or participated in a cell. He just couldn’t get away from them. What happened is, his first customer was too poor to buy himself a suit, so he decided to pay Emmanuel in speeches and propaganda sheets until he had enough to give him real bills. Try to feed your family with that! But Emmanuel read what he gave him, and in a flash, became a total know-it-all on the history of the Soviet revolution.

      The same thing happened with the Gaullists. Because of his discretion and his nice smile, the father got himself enrolled in the party of Charles de Gaulle by a school principal who also needed a fine suit. The end result? Depending on which orders came in, he’d become either a Gaullist or a communist, especially because he was crazy enough to agree with every idea that was expressed in his presence. He’d always remark, “Once you’ve said that, you’ve said it all.”

      It was his way of showing neutrality, but everyone else just thought he was agreeing with them. And I can guarantee that he never added another word. Not a “You’re so right,” or a “Well, there I tend to disagree.” Only that expression: “Once you’ve said that, you’ve said it all,” which, of course, is just a way to say nothing at all.

      He also knew how to keep his mouth shut if by chance the communist and the Gaullist got into an argument in front of him, because it sometimes happened that they both showed up around the same time for a fitting. Who knows why he never thought to give them appointments at different times. He just said, “Come by when you can.”

      So, of course, they’d have at it in his workshop of just about two square meters. And in the middle of all those different-colored spools of thread rattling around on the floor, the piles of cloth, catalogs, tape measures, needles—and the mice those mounds of paper and cloth had attracted—the two opponents always battled it out, insulting each other. The father watched out for himself by keeping his mouth full of straight pins.

      Emmanuel became a kind of black robot, busying himself with his customers, his chest covered in pins, his mouth full of them. The two men were so involved in their squabbling, it didn’t even occur to them to ask his opinion. In any case, his mouth was sealed on those occasions, and all he could manage was an occasional “Mmmm,” which could mean anything.