Читать книгу L'Amerique - Thierry Sagnier - Страница 7

Chapter 1

In Jeanot’s room off the main corridor were two bunk beds. Jeanot slept in the top one and when either of his sisters visited, she could have the bottom bunk. There was one chair, a floor lamp with a faulty bulb, and a false fireplace which Jeanot knew was the lair of unspeakable beings who no longer scared him. The focus of the room, though, was a large square table on which he kept his display of lead cowboys and Choctaw, Navajo, Kiowa and Apache warriors. He’d been told the Indians were from these specific tribes by the man in the toy store who’d sold him the small figures. In truth, Jeanot wasn’t sure the man knew his American Indians at all.

Jeanot’s Papa built the table from boards he found in the building’s cellar. The boy watched as his father sawed the ancient greying wood to the proper size, then used a hand-drill to make screw holes. Papa told Jeanot to put soap on the screw threads. “Like this,” Papa said, and he moistened the screw threads with his mouth, then rubbed them against a bar of brown soap. He sank the tip of the fastener into the drilled hole and handed Jeanot a screwdriver, placed the blade in the screw’s groove, and said, “Now turn it to the right.” Jeanot did and got the screw about a third of the way in. “It won’t turn anymore,” he said, and Papa took over.

It took two hours to build the table. When it was done, it didn’t wobble at all but stood as rock steady as any piece of furniture in the house, steadier, even, than the family dining room table that did wobble, and that Papa simply couldn’t cure, though he’d tried.

That same afternoon, Jeanot’s Maman knotted and dyed an old tablecloth a sand color in the kitchen sink. She balled several wads of paper, wetted them and sprinkled them with white flour from the kitchen. She put them in the small oven and lit it, and twenty minutes later, when the balls dried hard, she glued them to the table, draped the tablecloth over everything, and then tacked it into place. The tabletop became a North American desert of varied sand-colored hues with mounds made by the lumps of papier maché.

Maman painted the adjoining wall blue, with white clouds and a fierce yellow sun that baked the tablecloth desert. She put birds in the sky, vultures and eagles and a giant Andean condor she and Jeanot had read about in Paris Match. Below the sky she painted a verdant plain with buffaloes, gazelles and cows, because, she explained, she had always liked painting cows. Cows, said Maman, were so many fun colors: black, and brown, and white, all at the same time. She painted more cows than gazelles, but Jeanot didn’t mind.

Together, Jeanot and his mother made teepees from fabric remnants and dowels.

“Like this,” she showed him, gathering and tying the sticks together at one end. She made a cone, cut a small swatch of fabric and used clear brown glue to stick the fabric to the dowels. Then using a very small brush and oil paints, she decorated the teepees with images of stars, moons, horses, bears and antelopes. And cows.

For a long time the diorama was the focus of Jeanot’s world. Every holiday brought new braves and cowhands, some wielding lariats and pistols. The building’s Russian concierge, Sergei Kharkov, gave Jeanot a Cossack on a steed. The tiny figure wore a fur hat and brandished a shiny saber and it never entered Jeanot’s mind that a Cossack might be ill at ease in an Indian village.

The Cossack was followed by a set of plastic dinosaurs that for a while terrorized the village until the braves laid the last one low. Then appeared a fur-swathed seal-hunter in a kayak, wielding a harpoon. This was problematic until Maman created a pond on the far side of the table using an old cracked mirror and blue and white paint.

“You see? He fits right in,” she said.

Jeanot was doubtful at first. “There aren’t any seals in the desert,” he told her.

She thought about it for a moment then shrugged. “It’s America. Anything can happen.”

In 1955 in Paris, France, everything about Les États Unis was miraculous to a boy like Jeanot. He read voraciously and devoured three magazines a week: Tintin, Spirou, and Mickey. Tintin was excellent, by far his favorite, full of the serialized adventures of the magazine’s namesake, Tintin, a young reporter who traveled to the moon, defeated bad guys, and discovered treasures with his best friend, the drunken sailor, Capitaine Haddock. Spirou wasn’t bad and featured Lucky Luke, a sharpshooting cowboy in perpetual chase of the Dalton Brothers. Mickey, Jeanot thought, was really for little kids. He was fast outgrowing the magazine whose only saving grace was a weekly center page on Les États Unis.

He gleaned other information on the miraculous land across the Atlantic from his parents’ subscriptions to Paris Match and L’Écran. There was, as well, a large soft-covered book on the wonders of the world. There he learned about the Grand Canyon, geysers, Kodiak bears, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Lakes and the American Civil War—la Guerre de Sécession.

The magazines, however, didn’t answer every question. Jeanot found some things confusing, still. Puritans and settlers seemed interchangeable. Was George Washington still president, or was it Monsieur Roosevelt, in his wheelchair? Jeanot even heard some people say France had lost the war and it was American soldiers who had saved La Patrie, but that was patently ridiculous. The Germans, les Boches, had been defeated by men and women like his own parents, soldiers who had answered the call of the mythic Général de Gaulle, a giant of a man, three meters tall and strong as an oak tree.

Maman, who loved American motion pictures, would come home from shows raving about the latest film. She’d seen Oklahoma three times with Jeanot and from that show, he had deduced that everyone in America sang, and rather well at that. This was further borne out by the guitar-playing Gene Autrey and Roy Rogers. Maman never missed anything featuring Tyrone Powers, whom she maintained looked a lot like her Roland, though Jeanot could never see any resemblance between his Papa and the American movie star.

Personally, Jeanot enjoyed The Living Desert and saw much of America as a place of shifting sands, moving rocks, dangerous snakes and lizards, and flash floods. Obviously, l’Amérique was a place far more dangerous than peacetime Paris. Most days, Jeanot walked to school by himself, crossed streets, bought his own magazines at the corner kiosk, and once or twice a week was sent to the boulangerie to buy bread. He might not be able to survive a living desert, but he knew his own neighborhood as well as the courtyard of the building where he lived.

Occasionally, his father spoke of l’Amérique. Papa had been there as the traveling secretary to an important British person and had gone to such places as Chicago, New York and Saskatchewan, which was almost as fun to pronounce as Massachusetts. Maman always said, “Maches ta chaussette,” which meant, “Chew your sock,” but the joke was old and now Jeanot only smiled.

“Well,” said Papa, “You wouldn’t believe the buildings. They’re ten times taller than here, where we live.”

Jeanot knew his father was subject to exaggerations. Even his mother accused him of talking too big, saying things like, “Pft, Roland. What nonsense. Jeanot’s too smart to believe all this, aren’t you?”

Jeanot would nod yes, because he remembered the story his Papa had told once with a completely straight face about jumping out of an airplane.

Still, buildings that big? There’d been a story in Tintin about a building in New York City that was 381 meters tall, sixty meters taller than the Eiffel tower which, as every schoolkid in France knew, was 325 meters high. Maybe his Maman was right. In America, anything could happen.