Читать книгу L'Americain - John Launois - Страница 7

Though father, an expert steeple builder, enjoyed a degree of respect as an artisan, I had too often felt the contempt of some classmates. I heard them ask friends who were better off than me, “How can you play with a son of a worker?” It was the ultimate insult.

“No one, ever, at birth, whether worker, bourgeois, or aristocrat, is better than you are,” father told me in his great republican belief inspired by the Age of Enlightenment when French philosophers in 1789 had written Les Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen).

In September 1944, I was almost 16 but had never known a democratic France. I perceived the state of strife experienced in the past four years as fundamental and permanent. The occupiers had been removed but in my mind, the shackles of French society would remain. The only wealthy family I knew that didn’t follow antiquated rules of the ruling class was that of my friend Pierre. His family was well off, liberal, and deeply influenced by America; they had the openness of America and were the only ones who supported my dream of going to that faraway land.

Pierre’s mother loved me and treated me like a younger son, referring to me as “mon petit Jean.” Her daughter had a crush on me, and Pierre let me drive his Citroën Classic.

While the only books in my house were prizes I had received from school, Pierre’s house had a vast library, and they let me read whatever I wanted. The last book they gave me was A History of America.

In that book, I learned about Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the U.S. Constitution, and the Amendments in the Bill of Rights. I was attracted to the first great right, guaranteeing freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble, as well as the fourth right in which: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” This appealed to me because I had been checked and searched countless times during the past four years.

I was also impressed by Abraham Lincoln’s humble origins, his birth in a Kentucky log cabin as the son of a typical pioneer family, and his leadership in the Civil War, which abolished slavery and freed four million slaves. Later I read about America’s Great Depression and identified with the people’s hunger and joblessness as well.

Finally, in October of ‘44, I found a job with a parcel-delivery service, bicycling all day in Paris, pulling a large heavy trailer. It was backbreaking work, but at least I was earning a weekly paycheck to give mother. She gave me 20 percent as a weekly allowance.

On November 23, I turned 16—no longer in danger of forced labor, I burned my fake ID card. To celebrate my birthday, my friends thought we were old enough to make a trip to Paris’s Rue Taitbout and visit les filles de joie, literally the “girls of joy.”

Though we behaved like children, we bragged about becoming men. We set off, full of bravado, talking about women, but we knew nothing about women at all. The only beautiful thighs I had furtively seen belonged to my grade school teacher.

Before heading out on our sexual adventure, we each had a shot of cognac. It was a challenge: “Either we all go or nothing.” Hoping to boost our confidence, we told each other, “Guys c’mon, let’s go already.”

Together we walked along Rue Taitbout eyeing the street women. The way we hesitated, they knew it was our first time; they called out, “Are you going upstairs?” Large Rubenesque females overly made-up, they showed their wares in tight dresses draped over mighty breasts. These huge older women resembled seventeenth-century prostitutes, but they were all we could afford. They were like mastodons, especially compared to us—I found it frightening.

Eventually, they enticed us. After paying in advance for “30 minutes” and paying someone else for the room, each of us went upstairs with his own woman. I found myself in a tiny room with a bathtub and bed, used and filthy: nothing seemed clean.

My fille de joie told me, “Wash your zizi,” then began removing her clothes. I froze as I saw her fat derrière, thighs, and hanging breasts. “No thank you,” I said, “another time,” but she put her hand on my hand before I could turn the doorknob. “Nobody’s going to believe you if you go down now,” she declared. “Better wait 10 minutes, otherwise your friends will know you didn’t make it.”

So I waited. She told me, “Don’t worry, it happens all the time. Many young men are shy.” She reassured me, “One day, you’ll discover the pleasures of love,” but I just wanted to get out of there.

The strange thing was, my friends and I all came out at the same time. At a café, we asked each other, “How was it?” Avoiding each others’ eyes, we all said, “Great, great.” Since then, I never went back to Rue Taitbout, and though we never spoke of it again, I was convinced we had all remained virgins that day.

In December 1944, as the Allies pushed German forces back to Berlin, the New York Herald Tribune was again available in Paris. For five hard-earned francs, I’d buy the paper and read it with a French dictionary. I went to American movies to watch and listen to Gary Cooper, Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, and other Hollywood stars, while learning English reading subtitles.

April 12, 1945, less than one month before the end of the war in Europe, President Roosevelt died, and Vice President Harry S. Truman was sworn in as America’s 32^nd president.

Father thought it was sad that Roosevelt had not lived to see the end of the war. He greatly admired Roosevelt for standing up for “the little guy” while lifting America out of the Great Depression and leading the U.S. war effort. My father was not alone in his admiration: eventually a metro station on the Champs Elysées was named in Roosevelt’s honor.

Meanwhile, in Paris, the Vichy police chief was sentenced to death. Marshal Pétain was arrested on the Swiss border, and in Italy, a cowering Mussolini and his mistress were executed by partisans and strung up by their heels in Milan’s Piazza Loretto.

On April 30, 1945, Hitler, the self-proclaimed leader of Germany’s “master race,” brought to power by industrialists, army generals, junker landowners, and millions of ordinary Germans, shot himself in the head in his Berlin bunker.

Soviet forces and Western commanders accepted Germany’s total surrender on May 8, marking the end of the Nazi’s 1,000-year Reich and evil campaign. In my mind, both Germany and Nazism were one and the same. On the Champs Elysées, we sang, marched, and drank, but after the celebrations, I resumed pulling my bicycle trailer, delivering packages in Paris.

In July, trials for murder and the betrayal of France against Pétain, his deputy Pierre Laval, and other collaborators began. Though the defense claimed Pétain had helped save France, he was sentenced to death, but because Pétain was 89 years old, his sentence was commuted. Laval, however, was shot.

Still, in speaking to the men on my delivery routes, I began to understand that many who had served the Vichy government would never have to answer for themselves and would remain in power. As long as enough wine flowed and starvation was avoided, the bureaucracy would hardly change. By 1945 the occupation had exhausted the people of France and they would no longer take to the streets—there would be no people’s revolution seeking a more just society. Celebrations were over: I had lost faith and felt I no longer belonged in my own country.

On August 6, Japan’s Hiroshima was completely destroyed by America’s atomic bomb, and the obliteration of Nagasaki followed soon afterward. That horrible new weapon put an end to the war with Japan’s unconditional surrender on August 14.

These monumental events all took place very far away, while in Paris, little had changed since liberation. Through a friend, I got a job at the Chapuis Brothers’ Bicycle Factory. They treated me decently and paid me a technician’s salary, but I continued to talk about the United States. My dream was to drive across America and write poetry, and after nine months and several raises, I finally saved enough money to get my driver’s license on Christmas Eve in 1946—it would be “my license to freedom.”

In Marly, early 1947, I heard about an American photographer, Joe Pazen, who had a temporary job offer for an assistant who could drive, help carry equipment, and make rough translations. Pazen was a photojournalist for the Black Star photo agency in New York and a regular contributor to Life magazine’s Paris Bureau. The idea of driving Joe Pazen’s American Jeep was irresistible.

When I told mother I was quitting my job at the Chapuis Brothers for a two-month assignment with an American photojournalist, she said, “How can you possibly quit a secure job to work for an American for just two months?” She thought I was a fool, as did the Brothers Chapuis, but they promised to make me a director in a few years if I came back. But I never did go back.

Joe Pazen told me to call him by his first name, which was unheard of in France. It took me a while to get used to calling him Joe, so for a long time I called him, “Monsieur Joe.”

Slightly heavy, Joe would often go on a diet, but he loved good food and whiskey. Twice a week he played poker with other American journalists. In one night, he’d win or lose as much as my father made in a year.

There was a great love affair at that time between the French common man and the Americans, the most generous, egalitarian people I had ever met. Joe was always welcome in my home.

He took me to restaurants where we discussed assignments, then every night, he let me take the Jeep home. To protect it from thieves, I’d park it in my father’s garden, chain the steering wheel to the clutch, and remove the rotor from the distributor to cut off the distribution system.

Looking at the great holes I made in our vegetable plot, father complained, “You’re crushing my vegetables!” But he admitted France was so poor that thieves would steal anything, and we couldn’t let that happen to our American Jeep.

Under the windshield were the huge letters, “U.S. PRESS.” With that identification, you could virtually do anything. The American Jeep was the most popular vehicle in postwar France, and driving it made me a hero with my friends. “Johnny what’s happening?” they’d ask as I drove into Marly where there were practically no other cars. Though I was always speeding, I never got a ticket, because in that American Jeep, you could do no wrong—you were king of the road.

Two months quickly passed, and Joe hired me for two more years. Through Joe I met Kurt Kornfeld, vice president and one of the original founders of Black Star, on Kurt’s first postwar visit to Paris in 1947. Kurt had not seen Paris since 1936, after escaping Hitler’s Germany, before immigrating to New York.

Kurt was an ebullient man who called everyone “friend.” Perhaps because Kurt lost a son, a Time-magazine correspondent, killed in a jeep accident on his way to cover the Nuremberg trials the previous year, he insisted I walk him all over Paris “to breathe the free air on foot and not from a jeep.” Kurt was a fatherly man, generous with his advice, who assured me, “Photojournalism is a great calling.”

Joe Pazen became my mentor who taught me the first steps of the profession. As he believed my ambition to drive a truck across the USA to write poetry at night “wasn’t realistic,” Joe gave me a year’s worth of Life issues and told me to read Henry Luce’s definition of the greatest picture magazine in the world.

It read: “To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events…to see strange things—machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work…and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away…things dangerous to come to…to see and be amazed…” Henry Luce had put into words exactly what I wanted to do and what I would do.

Joe, who met and married a beautiful woman in England, eventually brought me to that island nation at the end of 1947—I loved England, for helping to liberate France.

From London, we produced one story a week, and I was popular in the new milieu of British journalism. A waitress on Fleet Street, the press district, regularly called me “dear,” and because I was so thin, she saved me steaks even during those rationed postwar days. It was a wonderful time.

Joe’s wife, “Paddy,” was tall, blond, blue-eyed, and beautiful with full lips and high cheekbones. Long-legged in a bathing suit, she looked like pinups of Californian women I’d seen in Joe’s copies of Yank magazine, yet with her satin-white complexion, she was clearly English.

In a confused way, I was in love with her, but she never knew. Like the English, people in Marly and Paris stared as she walked by in her elegant clothes. During subway rush hours in Paris, I often found myself squeezed against her, and embarrassed, felt erotic desires. Still a virgin, I was troubled and afraid to look at her when we got off the train, but never said a word. However, one day she explained she needed an “escort” because so many Frenchmen in the subways would pinch her behind, so one of my jobs became to stand behind her to ward off my pinching countrymen. She treated me like a brother, and I was happy.

In the spring of 1949, Joe went back to California and said I could join him there. Because I had no cameras of my own, Paddy lent me her Rolleicord, saying, “You can return it when you reach the west coast.”

Joe paid my last six months’ wages in American dollars so I could avoid the long wait of changing francs to dollars. Soon I knew I’d be going to California, with its Hollywood, Golden Gate Bridge, Death Valley, and Pacific Ocean.

All my friends in Marly learned of my imminent departure, but they didn’t share my enthusiasm. In a daze of excitement, I made preparations: for seven years I’d been waiting for this day. Meanwhile, Pepi, Time-Life’s bureau manager in Paris, made my reservation for third-class passage on the Liberté ocean liner.

Joe signed and mailed my sponsorship papers to the American Consulate in Paris. All I had to do was produce a valid passport with a “Certificate of Military Position” from French military authorities and my visa would be issued immediately. I rushed to the French National Service Bureau for the missing certificate, where, to my horror, I was handed an immediate draft order into the French Army.

It was one of the saddest days of my life. I suddenly had military instructions to report to Thionville, east of France, within 48 hours. Waiting at a café at the Gare de l’Est train station in Paris, I met a beautiful Flemish girl and told her my story. Speaking a mixture of Dutch and English, she took my hand and held it to her face, which had become as sad as mine. When my train came, we wiped each other’s tears, hugged, and kissed passionately. As the steam engine pulled out of the station, she waved goodbye to me, running after the train. We never saw each other again.

Thionville was the most dreadful, dreary, depressing military town I’d ever seen. As I arrived at the garrison, all I could see was a lonely soldier walking with a rifle.

When I reported on May 17, 1949, to the Registering Office, an officer looked at my papers and said, “You don’t have to serve—you’re a resident of London.” It was incredible news, but it would take a year to process the paperwork. Though I kept asking to be relieved of duty, nobody did a thing. In the end, I had to serve for a year.

The next day, I was issued my uniform: all used clothing and boots. In fact, everything I received was used including a filthy, beat-up, metal wine cup. France was so poor in those years that our uniforms looked as if they were made of carpet felt.

Basic training had already started by the time I arrived, and I was quickly thrown into rifle drills, saluting, marching left and right, roll calls, inspections, and lines to the canteen. Everyone in my platoon, company, and regiment knew I had been drafted while about to embark for California, and they all sympathized and shared my disgust.

Assigned as a crewmember for the “Long Tom,” a 155-millimeter American long-range cannon, I met a painter named Lulu. A private from Paris who always spoke of his Russian ancestors, he sprinkled his conversations with Russian words. He was upset that his work in “postwar expressionism” was suddenly interrupted by the draft. I agreed with his sentiment; artists had no place in the Army.

During breaks, Lulu spoke of Venice, Verona, Florence and lectured our gun crew about the architectural Renaissance in Italy. In midstream he’d switch subjects to his Russian grandfather’s odyssey to France after the Bolshevik revolution.

Losing the crew’s interest, he’d regain a full audience by objecting to the low quality of food we were fed daily, particularly the disgusting beef stew. We all agreed it was not fit for humans.

My first meal in the Army, beef stew, was so hard to chew that soldiers joked it was made of leather soles from discarded boots. It was followed by an inedible green salad.

Lulu told me, “If you don’t like the food and you have some money, it’s easy to jump the wall and find a restaurant.” He knew all the tricks about leaving the garrison without getting caught. Sneaking out to the city with Lulu, I treated him to dinner because most draftees in the French Army had no money. Full of wine, we came back pretty merry even though we knew we had missed roll call.

We crept to the low part of the wall where you could jump in and out easily. Scrambling over the wall, we fell right into the arms of the warrant officer.

So, on my first night in the French Army, I was taken to jail. We were each given a quarter loaf of bread and bottle of water. Lulu, having already been to jail for the same reason, told me, “You better wrap your bread with a towel and hang it from the wall or rats will eat it.” With just a blanket, we slept on wooden planks. After sleeping badly, we discovered that the rats had devoured our bread.

For our hearing, we were called in front of three officers. In five minutes, we were found guilty, sentenced to two weeks in jail and the immediate shaving of our heads. As we walked out of headquarters, a clerk from the window upstairs shouted to the guards leading us to the military barber, “Hold on! Launois got a suspended sentence!” Lulu was taken to the barber, but I was released because it was my first offense.

The Army didn’t know what to do with an artist. So one day they asked Lulu to think of a motif and paint the officers’ recreation room, reflecting France’s honor with great glorious battle scenes. He told me he was going to paint nude women in the Pacific. I learned later they caught him before his sketches became murals. I never found out what happened to Lulu.

During the first few months of service, I met another character named Lulu, a soldier from the rugged mountains of Auvergne. He was huge. He became kind of a bodyguard for me. Assigned to Germany for military maneuvers, we refused to ride the freight car made for eight horses or 40 men, so we got permission to ride the flatbed car where our artillery pieces were anchored.

Lulu had a fever from a bronchial infection and began coughing. When it started to rain heavily, I took my poncho off and wrapped him up in it. He never forgot that gesture.

Later, when an Alsatian sergeant, speaking French, gave me orders in a heavy German accent, I responded, “Four years of German orders are enough! I’m not going to take any orders from you.” As the sergeant reached over to grab me, big Lulu stepped between us. “You touch him,” he said, “you touch one hair on his head, and you’re finished.” The sergeant stepped back and never bothered me again.

In 1949 France, it was your national duty to serve your country, but the majority of draftees felt they owed little to France—certainly not their liberation, which they credited to the British and Americans.

The nation was poor and its conscript wages were so low you couldn’t buy necessities let alone a decent meal. As compensation, the Army issued its troops awful cigarettes made of the cheapest black tobacco. Most of my squad spent their weekends in barracks playing cards and drinking cheap wine. Everyone spoke of civilian life, symbolized by a “skittle,” a bowling pin, raised each day to the rafters like a flag.

After basic training, Lulu from Auvergne became the regiment’s head cook. He set us a separate table from the rest of the enlisted men, which meant we had the best cuts of meat. Lulu was a good friend, but he was upset about my plan to go to America. He had seen too many Hollywood films about Indians massacring white people.

When I was transferred from Thionville to Fort Romainville near Paris, Lulu made a basket of food that would last me a week. Walking me to the gate, he wept inconsolably, saying, “If you go to America, you’ll get killed by the Indians and I’ll never see you again.” We hugged goodbye and I never saw him again.

After six months, I was promoted to “brigadier chief,” an NCO, noncommissioned officer, putting me in charge of about a dozen men. At roll call and when assigned various duties, they obeyed without enthusiasm except for standing smartly at attention each morning to solemnly salute the “rising pin.”

Everyone dreamed of civilian life. At daily dismissal, one man would cross out another day on the barrack’s wall calendar. All the men cheered and shouted, “One less day!” Being an NCO put an end to my awful cigarettes and hard soap from Marseilles. No longer eating with enlisted men, I dined at the officers’ mess hall where the quality of food was much higher and wine was served in glasses instead of battered cups.

One day I was shocked noticing the steaks for officers were twice the size of steaks for NCOs. Angry, I convinced all the NCOs not to touch their plates until we were served steaks of equal size. All agreed, and they followed me out of the mess hall. Our food was left untouched on the table.

To my colonel, the commanding officer, I was immediately reported as the instigator. He was enraged. “I have no choice but to court-martial you for mutiny.” I was scared because I knew what mutiny meant.

Even so, the colonel liked me because I often translated for him and photographed the regiment, making big prints for him, courtesy of Life. “What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked. “This incident was not an isolated event,” I said. “It was unfair and we shouldn’t be treated as inferiors.”

The lieutenant and captain, my immediate superiors, pled my case, saying I had “shown great initiative and leadership qualities.” After their pleas, I reported back to the colonel. He said, “I’ll make an exception for you but never put yourself in this position again. Next time, put your complaints in writing through the chain of command and don’t act like a revolutionary.”

So I went on photographing the regiment, developing my film at Life’s office in Paris. Making prints for the great Life photographer Dimitri Kessel and others, I earned $10 a night, almost more than I made in a month from the French Army.

Joe Pazen was kind enough to give me his American war correspondent’s uniform, which I recut to fit me. So in the French Army, I was dressed in an American officer’s uniform. Nobody complained.

Two months before my military discharge, I was assigned to make a pickup at Fort Vincennes. I brought with me four or five guys dressed in fatigues, the Army’s work uniform. Hungry, we parked my Dodge pickup by a sidewalk café. Just as we were dipping some croissants in our coffee, a Peugeot came to a screeching halt. A full colonel got out and shouted, “Who’s in charge here?” I said, “Moi, mon colonel.” Yelling, he said, “How can you let your men possibly have coffee in a public place in fatigues?” I explained, “They had no breakfast when we left. The men were hungry.”

Ordered to report to his office, I stood at attention as the colonel snarled, “Your conduct was inexcusable and you put the Army to shame. I’m recommending a four-week sentence in jail!”

He dismissed me and I saluted in disbelief. It was late spring and less than a month away from my discharge. The charges meant my class would be released from duty while I’d stay behind in jail.

Upon receiving formal charges, my colonel, captain, and lieutenant made an impassioned plea for a suspended sentence in view of my “exemplary leadership qualities, photographic work, and for being a good example to my men.”

The colonel in Vincennes reluctantly agreed to suspend my sentence. The problem was that I already had one suspended sentence from jumping the wall in Thionville. With both sentences combined, I’d have to spend six weeks in jail.

I must’ve had a friend in the records department, as somehow my first suspended sentence disappeared from the books, or perhaps my commanding officer just ignored it. I’m sure they thought being thrown in jail for taking my men in fatigues to a café was absurd.

After one long year, on May 17, 1950, several of us dressed in civilian clothes made bundles of our uniforms and boots and returned them to the quartermaster’s supply store for the next class of conscripts. The men I had authorized to have coffee and croissants in Vincennes invited me for a round of cognac as soon as we were out of Fort Romainville. We toasted our newly won freedom late into the evening. The colonel from Vincennes was cursed profusely while my ex-commanding officer was praised for permanently suspending my sentence.

With my discharge papers finally in hand in May 1950, I obtained my “Certificate of Military Position” at last and went to the American Embassy in Paris to obtain my Visa while Time-Life’s general assistant, Pepi, again reserved my third-class space on the Liberté liner. When I went to American Express to buy my ticket, I discovered the $300 Joe Pazen had paid me were all counterfeit. I figured he must have won the phoney money in a poker game.

Once again, Pepi had to cancel my reservation to America. I was devastated and had to find work. Fortunately, Time-Life’s bureau chief, Elmer Lower, found me a well-paid job as a photographic technician in Paris at the Marshall Plan headquarters.

By the fall of 1950, I had finally saved enough to buy a ticket on the Liberté liner to New York, with $50 left in my pocket. Mother seemed to look forward to my departure, perhaps annoyed I had kept most of my wages to buy the boat fare. “When will you leave?” she kept repeating, and I’d answer, “One day soon, and you may never see me again.”

My last month in France was a lonely time. Pierre’s family was still supportive, but most of my friends thought I was an “idealistic fool,” asking, “What can you find in America that you can’t find in France?” I replied, “Freedom, opportunity, and open roads.” It was all beyond their imagination.

My father could climb a steeple, but he could not cross an ocean, and he imagined the American continent fraught with dangers. Remembering our American GI guests, he said, “They don’t even appreciate good wines over there.” But he knew I didn’t drink much wine.