L'Amerique. Thierry Sagnier

pointing to her navel, and Dédé, now with certainty, said, “This is NOT Fantasia!”

      Babette giggled, elbowed Jeanot in the ribs. The audience was transfixed. The now half-naked Boche, still whipping her leg with the riding crop, turned around and wiggled her rear.

      Jeanot leaned to Babette and whispered, “Why is she doing that?”

      Before Babette could answer, the woman dropped her skirt. Now she was totally naked save for boots, a German military cap, and the riding crop. She stepped off screen for a moment and returned leading a large man wearing black pants, a striped shirt and a beret. There was no mistaking the nationality. One of the boys hissed, “Sale Boche,” dirty Hun, and Babette nodded.

      The booted woman unclasped the man’s belt and lowered his trousers. Jeanot saw the man had no underwear and wondered if perhaps he couldn’t afford them. The woman dropped to her knees and placed the man’s zizi in her mouth. Even Babette gasped. There was embarrassed laughter from the boys; all the girls—except for Babette—hid their eyes behind their hands.

      Jeanot stared, mesmerized. Babette, in a rare show of modesty, tried to cover his eyes with a hand. He batted it away. “Don’t! I want to see!”

      After a while the woman got on her back and spread her legs. The man lay on her gracelessly, his white pimply rump bobbing up and down. Then he turned the woman around and thrust at her from the rear. A brief view of her face showed boredom and endurance before she turned and smiled for the camera. At this precise moment, the living room door opened. Maman peeked in, asked, “Are you enjoying… Mon Dieu!”

      She rushed and pulled the projector’s plug out of the wall. The projector fell to the ground with a thud and Babette laughed. One of the reels came loose and rolled around the floor, disgorging a tumble of film.

      Maman turned the lights on. The girls were still covering their eyes—Babette wasn’t—and the boys were open-mouthed. Maman shooed them into another room with promises of chocolate ice cream and cake. She booted the reel across the floor and kicked angrily at the film, then went to find the projectionist.

      The children heard yells, curses from both Jeanot’s mother and the fat cinematographer. Jeanot peeked back into the sitting room and saw the projectionist attempting unsuccessfully to wind the film back on the reel as Maman pushed him out the door. He protested that it had been an honest mistake: Fantasia was next to Fantaisies Nazies in his film closet. He and his wife had been running late for the party and he’d grabbed the wrong reel.

      Babette appeared beside Jeanot, smiled knowingly and nudged him. “You know what they were doing? They were screwing… He put his thing into her and goes in and out and it makes them both feel good, and then he pees in her and they make a baby.”

      Jeanot nodded, not fully understanding but not wanting to appear stupid, either. “They didn’t look like they were feeling good. They looked almost sad.”

      Dédé said, “I knew it wasn’t Fantasia!”

      Babette momentarily reigned supreme since she was the only one who understood what they had witnessed. She tried hard to clarify it but her explanations fell short. “Did you see? Did you see what he did?” She whispèred again and again to Jeanot. Jeanot simply nodded his head. This was not going to end well, he knew. There would be ramifications, blame assigned, possibly some more yelling and tears.

      “We’re going to get in trouble,” he said. “Just watch.”

      Babette smirked. “You little kids don’t even know what you saw, do you?” She challenged Jeanot and Dédé again. The latter had told Jeanot that he didn’t like Babette. That was comforting, in a way. Dédé said she was a know-it-all like his cousin, whom he didn’t like either. He professed no interest in naked men and women and said he had come to Jeanot’s party strictly for the cake and a movie. The cake was apparently only so-so. His mother, he scoffed, made better, and he was massively disappointed in the film. He left the room, calling to his parents that he wanted to go home.

      There was now a dreadful silence emanating from the gathered adults. The projectionist’s wife was ashen and weeping quietly, protesting she hadn’t known her husband possessed such things; it called into question everything about her marriage. Surely Maman was exaggerating, she insisted. The movie may have been a bit risqué, but pornographic? She pushed past her husband who was still trying to wind the film onto the reel, grabbed a handful of film and held it up to the light. She dropped the offending material as if it were alive. She slapped her husband in the face with a resounding crack, then stumbled out the door gasping apologies.

      Parents rushed to their offspring to check on their health. The kids were rounded up and a mother with operatic ambitions led them in song: Frère Jacques, Au Clair de la Lune, and Alouette, and finally, out of sheer desperation, Edith Piaf’s Rien de Rien, which they hummed since no one knew the words except Babette. Small voices reached for the high notes and broke, and when the singing was over almost everyone left, some surreptitiously taking back unopened presents. All that remained were cake crumbs on the floor and half-empty glasses of lemonade and Orangina.

      Jeanot watched it all happen as from a distance. He hadn’t been that interested in a party in the first place but was glad some of the presents were left. He sat on the floor and unwrapped them carefully, Babette squatting at his side.

      There was a Jokari; a hard rubber ball attached to a long elastic band that in turn was tied to a heavy stand. The game came with two paddles, and Jeanot thought the courtyard would be big enough but wondered who in the apartment complex would have the time to play with him. There were four lead cowboys, a book on Indians of the Amazon, a box of chocolates that was obviously a hand-me-down gift, a scarf, three pairs of socks and four pairs of cotton underwear.

      Babette took the box of chocolates and opened it. Three pieces were missing from the center row.

      “Who gave you this?”

      Jeanot thought it might have been Dédé. That would explain the missing pieces. “I don’t know. Dédé maybe?” He bent down and sniffed the box. It smelled like onions. “Oui. Dédé.”

      Babette made a face, selected a chocolate and popped it onto her mouth. She chewed pensively, then gave Jeanot a hug. “You’re going to be much more interesting in a few years, when you understand things.”

      Jeanot considered the statement and shrugged it off. “That movie wasn’t fun at all. It was really dumb, and those naked people...ils n’étaient pas beaux. They weren’t very pretty. And they didn’t say anything, or even smile at each other. What was Maman thinking?”

      He opened the book on the Amazon and looked for pictures of shrunken heads. He didn’t find any; the photos showed multi-colored birds, men in dirty trousers and raggedy hats, and a lot of green jungle.

      He added the new lead cowboys to the Wild West diorama in his room. They were all duplicates and he placed them at opposite ends of the table.

      After a while, he and Babette took the Jokari to the courtyard. Babette managed to hit the ball repeatedly, sending it speeding until it reached the end of the elastic and came bounding back. Jeanot swatted at it, missed most of the time, and then found the rhythm of the game. They exchanged strokes until the concierge told them to stop.

      When they returned to the apartment, Jeanot said, “Maman told me that it’s storks that bring babies, not naked men and women.”

      Babette paused in mid-step, gave him a searching look and said, “Your Maman is wrong.”

      Chapter 8

      Jeanot’s école maternelle at rue des Epinettes annually put on a show for parents and local dignitaries to involve them in the education of their children. Originally launched by the mayor of the 17th arrondissement as a platform for politicking, over time the show had become a spectacle, with preparations beginning at the start of the school year and involving stage sets, music, sound effects, costumes and special lighting. This year’s special guest was Jules Dassin. Jeanot’s teacher, Madame Charbonneau explained that Dassin was a director whose 1942 film