Book of My Mother Read Free Page B

recall our arrival in Marseilles. I was five. When I came off the ship, clutching the skirt of Maman, who was wearing a cherry-trimmed straw hat, I was frightened by the trams, for those vehicles moved by themselves. I sought comfort in the thought that there must be a horse hidden inside.
    We knew no one in Marseilles, where we had come from our Greek island of Corfu. We landed as in a dream, my father, my mother, and I – as in some absurd, slightly clownish dream. Why Marseilles? The leader of our expedition himself did not know why. He had heard that Marseilles was a big city. My poor father’s first exploit, a few days after we arrived, was to let himself be robbed blind by a businessman whose hair was fair and whose nose was not hooked. I can still see my parents crying in their cheap hotel room, as they sat on the edge of the bed. Maman’s tears dropped onto the cherry-trimmed hat in her lap. I was crying too, though I did not understand what had happened.
    Soon after we landed my father left me, in a state of terror and bewilderment, for I knew not a word of French, in a little school run by Catholic sisters. I stayed there from morning till evening while my parents tried to earn a living in a vast, frightening world. Sometimes they had to leave so early in the morning that they had not the heart to wake me. So when the alarm rang at seven I would find the coffeepot swathed in flannel by my mother, who had made time, at five in the morning, to sketch a comforting little drawing as a substitute for her kiss and leave it propped up against my cup. I can see some of those drawings now: a boat carrying Albert, minute beside a gigantic bar of nougat which was all for him; an elephant called Guillaume carrying his girlfriend, an ant who answered to the sweet name of Nastrine; a little hippopotamus who wouldn’t finish his soup; a chick with a vaguely rabbinical air playing with a lion. On such days I breakfasted alone, facing the photograph of Maman which she had also placed opposite my cup to keep me company. As I ate my breakfast I thought of Paul, a handsome child who was my ideal and my best friend – so much so that one Thursday I invited him home and enthusiastically gave him all our silver cutlery, which he calmly accepted. Or else I told myself adventure stories in which I saved France, galloping at the head of a regiment. I can still see myself cutting the bread, taking care to poke out my tongue because I thought that essential for smooth slicing. I recall how, when I left the flat, I would close the door with a lasso. I was five or six and very small. The doorknob was placed very high, so I would fish a bit of string out of my pocket, shut one eye, and take aim. When I had caught the china knob I would pull it toward me. Following my parents’ advice, I would then bang on the door several times to make sure it was really closed. I have kept the habit.
    At the Catholic sisters’ school there were no fees. There were two menus at lunchtime: a five-centime menu for the poor, which was rice, and a fifteen-centime menu for the rich, which was rice and a minute sausage. I gazed from afar at the menu for the rich, which I could devour only with my eyes. When I had fifteen centimes it was Paul, that ruthless charmer, who enjoyed the meal for the rich.
    I remember that the Mother Superior – who kept us in order with large castanets called clappers, which beat time for our straggling processions along corridors reeking of disinfectant – sometimes sighed with regret as she gazed at the pretty child I was then, carefully shredding linen to make lint for hospitals, which was the main feature of the curriculum, or absorbed in the production of nauseous truffles. I made them by letting two bars of Menier chocolate melt in my tightly closed hand. And I would shake my fist idiotically, because that was supposed to help the process, the outcome of which was a sickening mash which left brown streaks all over my face and