The Propagandist E-Book

Cécile Desprairies

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 252

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Astounding ... A haunting tale of guilt' The Telegraph, Five Star Review 'An unforgettable portrait of a singular woman and her frenzied efforts to launder her unsavoury past' Literary Review 'Aharrowing but elegantly constructed rot-riddled family romance' Financial Times 'Devastatingly effective' The Times 'In her debut novel, a historian of Vichy France tackles her family's real-life collaboration during the Second World War' New Yorker Best Books of the Year 'Full of so many secrets that it's a wonder she managed to write it all' New York Times 'Shows why historical fiction matters, how stories breathe life into forgotten moments ... Haunting' Cara Black, author of Three Hours in Paris In a grand Paris apartment, a young girl attends gatherings regularly organised by her mother. They talk about clothes and exchange the day's gossip, but the mood grows dark when they start to talk about her past, and the great love she is said to have known during the Second World War. When the girl grows up, she looks into the enigmatic figures in and around her family. Who was the man her mother fell in love with before the war? Why did they zealously collaborate with the Nazi occupiers of France? And why did they remain for decades afterwards obsessive devotees of that lost cause? In The Propagandist, a historian of Vichy France investigates the secrets, lies and omissions in her own family in the way she has investigated those of France itself. It is a masterpiece of psychological insight, revealing how people can spend a lifetime deceiving themselves, rather than confront their own past. READER REVIEWS 'A brilliant piece of fiction that unequivocally deserves five stars' 'Beautifully written' 'Nearly impossible to set down' 'Fascinating and complex'

Leseprobe

To Jeanne

1

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I would listen to my mother talking softly to herself about “the 1940s.” At the wheel of her gray Citroën 2CV convertible, driving at a steady twenty miles an hour, oblivious to the still-blinking turn signal, she muttered away, at constant risk of an accident. “I didn’t see him,” would have been her sole excuse.

This was Paris in the mid-1960s. I was six or seven years old, and pretty sure my mother was truly herself only when she was in the car talking to herself, nodding her head with a deep sigh, lifting a beringed hand, then listlessly letting it drop back down to the steering wheel. I sensed, in her long-suffering brooding over the past, an obsession with something I couldn’t understand. I thought she must be brave simply to carry on living.

While she waited for the traffic light to change, she fumbled in the glove compartment among a mess of half-melted chocolate-coated caramels, used-up tubes of lipstick, a fake tortoiseshell comb, a headscarf, hairpins, and parking passes to be displayed in the windshield. She checked in the rearview mirror that her face wasn’t betraying her and fiddled with her chignon. At such moments, she looked almost at peace.

Sitting in the back seat, reminding her now and then of her responsibilities (“Signal!” “Shift into second gear,” “Watch out!”), I listened to her murmuring intensely, over and over, “The bastards!” In response to my prodding, I was told this term referred to all those who had “condemned” Pétain and Laval and “murdered” Henriot. She swallowed the syllables as she uttered their names. I supposed the men had died tragically or perhaps had been victims of a miscarriage of justice. I thought she must be talking about the great-uncles. There were several in the family.

Inside her rattletrap of a car (which she told me was, like a Faraday cage, there to protect us from being struck by lightning), adrift in her musings, and barely responsive, she gave only the vaguest answers to my questions. We were often on our way to the Bois de Boulogne, not far from where we lived, where she was particularly fond of taking me. She told me about the famous restaurant called La Grande Cascade and said we would go there for dinner one day. (I hadn’t made any such request.)

“To the restaurant?”

“Yes, we’ll go together.”

But later, when I reminded her, she insisted I was mistaken.

“I can’t have said that. You don’t take children to that kind of restaurant.”

We stopped at a tall impressive tree known as the “oak of the executed,” on which was nailed a rusty plaque with the inscription “Passersby / Respect this oak tree / It bears the traces of the bullets that killed our martyrs.” What martyrs? Christian martyrs? My mother’s response was cagey.

We headed for the Jardins de Bagatelle. Its name was another mystery. What bagatelle? If it was really some trifling thing, as the name indicated, where was the frivolity, if around the park the talk was all of martyrs?

It was back home in our apartment that I mainly heard talk of “the bastards,” when my immediate female relatives— my mother, aunt, cousin, and grandmother—gathered most mornings in an atmosphere that resembled a gynaeceum, the women’s quarters in a house in ancient Greece.

We lived in Paris’s 17th arrondissement, a not particularly fashionable neighborhood bordering the suburb of Levallois, in a low-rise building that looked onto a garden enclosed by two more buildings, one to the left and one to the right. In the central block, on the second floor, lived my parents, my two brothers, my sister, and me. On the seventh floor of the block on the right, with a view straight into ours, lived my widowed maternal grandmother. After her death, my aunt Zizi, my mother’s sister, inherited the apartment. On the third floor of the block on the left lived Zizi’s daughter, my cousin Hedy.

This meant that everyone just had to look out of the window to see who was at home. The women watched for the lights to change in our apartment, waiting until the coast was clear; as soon as they were sure my father had left for work, they were at the front door within minutes, practically on his heels, having made every effort to avoid bumping into him. If, despite taking precautions, one of the ladies crossed his path, she murmured an embarrassed “Good morning, Charles,” and an awkward pretext to explain what she was doing there so early: “I was just dropping something off for Lucie.”

When she was with these women, my mother played down her life as a traditional housewife with a husband and children. Grandmother Hermine, whom I called Herminette, had always kept her life separate from that of her husband and, though they shared an apartment, each had their own bedroom. Widowed relatively young, freed of a husband who had turned out to be more than a little parsimonious but now had the distinct advantage of being deceased, Herminette carried on with her life, grateful at last to be able to spend a little money.

My aunt Denise detested her given name and always called herself Zizi. She too had once had a husband, but a few years after the birth of their daughter they had gotten divorced. She kept her private life shrouded in mystery, now and again alluding to a “friend” whose sex she did not specify and with whom she was forever falling out. Her daughter, Hedy, just turned twenty, had been brought up mostly by our grandmother and was often deeply and unhappily in love.

Everyone was there by 9 a.m. There would be raised voices and much flapping of hands; peace and quiet were not these women’s forte. Almost as soon as they arrived, they were complaining and exclaiming (a bleak and disappointed “Oh no!” at the prospect of having to sign a check), gesticulating, shaking their heads in disappointment, twitching their feet on the carpet.

The atmosphere built up as the women’s performance got under way. It was always basically the same, with minor variations introduced by some bitter new spat. They were quite detached from whatever was going on in the outside world, a tribe of women living in exile from their own country, as if on a desert island. Occasionally, and somewhat absurdly given that the din never died down, my mother would wave her fist and cry, “Be quiet now!”

Because there is no such thing as a show without an audience, I, la petite, bore silent witness to it all. My older brother and sister were at school. I lingered barefoot most of the morning, excused from school by a note from my mother, which she wrote by the light of an old brass lamp, sitting on a chair at her sloping bureau, clad in a pale blue robe, half-moon spectacles perched on the end of her nose. She took great care writing these notes, dipping her pen from time to time into a pot of midnight-blue ink, then rereading and fastidiously correcting the upstrokes and downstrokes of her extravagant handwriting with a loop or a horizontal line, as if pinning each letter to the page: “My daughter is rather tired today. She had a slight fever this morning. I am worried she might be coming down with something, so I have decided, as a precaution, to keep her at home today.”

With my short hair and pale complexion—“You’re looking green,” observed my mother with a little moue of satisfaction—I was supposed, like the maids, to remain invisible. That was and had always been my designated status.

The women put on their show without ever explaining to me what was going on. It was like watching a play in a foreign language without subtitles, and I still didn’t know whether it would end well or badly.

Was it all simply a cultural phenomenon? This side of the family were pieds noirs, whose predecessors had been among the first colonialists to settle in Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century, the poorest of the poor who had put all their hopes and aspirations into this El Dorado—at the time made up of three French departments, Algiers, Oran, and Constantine— on the other side of the Mediterranean. A century later, between the wars, they had had the bright idea of returning to mainland France, thus avoiding the catastrophe of a hasty departure thirty years later when Algeria declared its independence. Those who had waited lost everything.

This branch of the family had maintained many of the traditions of the Maghreb, one of which was the accommodation of young children in women’s activities, whether at home or at the public hammam. Children would wander in and out of groups of women who were often more or less half naked and so bound up in their affairs that they paid them barely any attention.

I observed my mother, impassive, surrounded by her closest relatives, nodding her approval or chiming in with an observation as she secured a lock of hair that had escaped from the hastily pinned-up blond chignon she wore high on her head. She was not born blond, but she went blond as a young woman. Her hair was one of her few vanities. She spent long periods at the hair salon, sequestered under the helmet dryer, falling into a kind of trance, then waking with a start every so often to focus on the scandal magazine in her lap. Her hair was her identity. When she neglected it, it was a sign she was not having a good day.

She profited from the occasional lull in the daily family gatherings to write out a check for her sister, Zizi, one year and one month younger than she, to sign. Zizi was not the name on my aunt’s identity card, which, moreover, she had clumsily altered to make herself younger by six years, adding a cross to the one in 1921 to make it look like she had been born, somewhat improbably, in 1927. Once again, it was up to my mother to try to sort out her sister’s faux pas with the authorities. There was so much to sort out, including many parking fines affixed to my scatterbrained aunt’s convertible Caravelle, which she challenged with extravagant bad faith (“This is totally ab-surd!”) and which, for some mysterious reason, my father received and always ended up paying.

Zizi was petite, permanently tanned, drenched in heady perfume, with dark cropped hair that she carefully dyed and cut herself in the style of Audrey Hepburn, and possessed of a volatile temper. She dressed entirely in black: a polo-neck, regardless of the season, tight pants, high-heeled boots, and tinkling heavy silver chains and bangles. They all thought she was fanatical about housework and cleanliness, and she didn’t deny it. She watched her weight, obsessed over the slightest sign of aging behind the smoky lenses of the Sophia Loren sunglasses that masked half her face, and boasted that all she kept in her refrigerator were beauty products—pots of face cream, serums, substances with English names that promised eternal youth—while my mother nagged her about third-party provisional payments and parking fines.

I understood the words party, provisions, and parking, but wondered what it was that might connect them. I pictured an enforcement officer dancing alongside her car as he slid the parking fine under the windshield wiper. Sometimes my mother parked her Citroën 2CV on the crosswalk outside the post office where she was popping in to withdraw some cash. She would leave me in the car with strict instructions to explain to the cop that she would be back in two minutes. The wait seemed endless. I thought I saw a police officer approaching and watched carefully for him to begin his dance. My mother arrived, out of breath—“What a dreadful queue, the wait was endless!”—and I still hadn’t seen anything. She pulled the starter of the noisy 2CV and drove off, the car spluttering.

My aunt’s commedia dell’arte character was tricky, while my mother’s was practical. Cousin Hedy played the innocent. Hedy had something of both a naïve young girl and an unhappy woman about her. The performers, with studied gestures, elaborated their plays from a sequence of tableaux that could have been titled, like photo novels, “Disappointed Love,” “Regrets for a Bygone Era,” or “The Fitting Room,” for in the end it always came back to clothes. The women dressed up. Each had clearly had her moment of glory, even triumph. They never bragged about it beyond their little circle, and I didn’t know any details, but I could tell.

During the morning ritual, the mistress of ceremonies was always my mother, Lucie, like a ringmaster out of a Molière play. She was both the brains and the armed wing of the group, keeping the other women in check. They couldn’t manage without her, but in return they insisted she knew her place. She found the endlessly repeated performances hammy and overblown. “Always the same faces, the same stories. I’d be better off reading a book,” she said. Sometimes I heard her sigh.

“I know her, your mother. She can’t fool me,” my aunt whispered to me dramatically, refusing to say more, as she knelt to untangle the fringe that ran along the edge of the carpet, licking her index finger and then smoothing the fringe down with the flat of her hand.

The women spoke their own language. They needed to utter only a single word or part of a sentence for the meaning to be manifestly clear to the others, yet I always had the feeling they were hiding something from me. There were explanations of things I couldn’t grasp or understand. It was obvious they were bound by collective memories, which they conjured up, obliquely, every single day. They had a direct line to their past.

I was fascinated by the way the other women seemed to hold sway over my mother, who behaved differently when she was with them—no longer a wife and mother, but one of them. There was a side of her that eluded me.

Lucie had, to use the professional jargon, a portfolio career with multiple roles. She liked to say that with her law degree she could have been a lawyer or a judge, but that she had always preferred to do whatsoever she pleased, whensoever she pleased. She was much sought after for her expertise, but never paid for it. As head of the apartment block’s joint ownership board, she relished dropping the “homeowners’ association” into conversation, with particular emphasis on the first word. To hear her, there was no homeowner quite as much of a homeowner as the head of the joint ownership board, and no meeting quite as important as the board’s annual general meeting. The board (which for a long time I thought was spelled bored), of which she was the grande dame and principal spokesperson, came up time and again in conversation. She was always dealing with some real estate proceedings and answering a stream of telephone calls. “I saw the attorney,” she would declare with a self-confident air, letting it be understood not only that she had known him for many years, but that the law was on her side.

Secular in both spirit and lifestyle, she detested churchiness, and refused to get involved in any charitable activities. She was, however, more than happy to serve as scribe for some former maid fallen on hard times, writing letters on her behalf, filling in forms required by the welfare system, listening and trying to untangle her problems. She took pleasure in the knowledge that she was the woman’s superior. “Is your mother home?” I would hear as I opened the front door to yet another supplicant.

Along with her law degree she had taken a minor in biology, gaining a double degree, which she somehow made sound as if she had conducted a double life during the war. So many studies. And then nothing. Supposedly, she led an entirely bourgeois life, yet she seemed to have nothing to say to other women of her class and was quite unable to conceal her impatience when she was with them, cutting short their gossip, bringing conversations to an abrupt close, sometimes simply getting up and walking off. “Luc-ie!” her interlocutor would call after her, bewildered. It was another one of those maternal mysteries. All that education had not made her any more civilized.

Her principal occupation was doing the accounts for her sister’s store, which was known rather pompously outside their circle as the “antiques emporium.” In the early 1960s my aunt Zizi, who had just turned forty and was driving her friends and relatives crazy with her unfocused energy, was convinced by my mother to open an antiques store. Zizi had never studied art history, and the television was her only entertainment, but she did have, she conceded, “some nice stuff to get rid of.” She kept it in the basement. “You can’t pick that kind of thing up anymore. No one wants to clear out their apartment nowadays.”

She liked furniture that emanated power. Everything was a “period piece,” whether Directoire, Empire, or “late nineteenth century.” Sometimes she would concede that a piece was a “very decent copy.” The emporium was really no more than an upscale secondhand store, selling furniture from real estate foreclosures, statues from countries that turned a blind eye to illegal exports, curios my aunt picked up at flea markets, and jewelry my mother purchased by weight at municipal credit auctions, saying confusingly that she had obtained the jewelry from “my aunt.” Zizi mostly sold her stock to other women. There was no postpurchase service. No one was going to get their hands on her nice little earnings. Any unhappy customer was swiftly shown the door.

My mother also did her sister’s tax return and negotiated adjustments with the taxman. “I have that dear little inspector eating out of my hand,” she said cheerfully, apparently convinced that right up until the mid-1960s every functionary could be bribed, and a deal could be struck on every tax bill. My mother begged him to understand: she was helping out her sister, who was a little feebleminded. “You and your sister,” the inspector repeated, as if they were one and the same person.

As she dealt with time-consuming bureaucratic chores, the ladies sat around flapping their hands in her living room, most of the time clad in little more than panties, panty hose, and brassieres. Their panty hose, squeezed tight at the waist, were often darned and not very becoming. Their brassieres had seen better days. There was nothing erotic about the intimate displays of these women—one in her seventies, two in their forties, and my twenty-year-old cousin—but I found it all endlessly intriguing.

At 9 a.m. on the dot, the women turned up for their peculiar rituals. They were fully made-up, laden with jewelry, ready to perform. Yet the moment they entered the apartment they began to remove their clothes, as if preparing to put on a different costume. The time they spent in their undergarments was worthy of a doctor’s examination room—“Please get undressed and someone will be along to get you.” It was so protracted it was almost as if the trying on of clothes that followed was merely a pretext. They had come over to parade, self-satisfied and half naked. In performance, in competition, they were like actresses, except that I was their only audience. My mother offered them no refreshments. The sessions always took place in the morning. For a long time, I believed that the expression “at the theater” referred to the early part of the day.

The maid was in the apartment but confined to the kitchen, and plainly despised by the ladies’ club—the only thing they could bring themselves to say about her was that she “smelled very strongly under the arms.” My mother underpaid a succession of very young women who came from the countryside, mostly from Nièvre, Calvados, or Mayenne, whom she usually picked out from the produce stall at the market.

“You haven’t got one of your girls for me, do you? She’ll get board and lodging and I’ll sort her out shorthand lessons. She’ll have her afternoons to herself.” Often as good as illiterate, these girls put up with my mother’s fits of rage and stayed until they got married, unless they “did wrong,” in which case they were immediately sent packing, picked up and taken home by a brutal father. They were servants in the real sense of the term, who lived with us and were granted Sundays off. The advantage of an illiterate maid, my mother seemed to think, was that she understood nothing and did not speak unless spoken to.

At around 11 a.m. Lucie announced it was time to call it a day and she was off to get properly dressed. The other women prepared to leave, making an unsolicited detour through the kitchen. They stood at the open refrigerator and filled their faces like hamsters. Unlike my mother, they did not know how to cook: my grandmother survived on café au lait and tapioca as she had in Algeria, my aunt on tea and biscuits, and my cousin ate anything.

After the women left, in the empty hours of the day, my mother would make me recite my irregular German verbs. Backen, buk, gebacken: “to bake.” “Again. Good. You know it now.” Bremen, Hamburg, Stettin; the Weser, the Elbe, and the Oder. I chorused after her the names of cities and rivers I could not locate on a map. I learned about Mendel’s laws. Dominant and recessive genes. The strong and the weak. The example of blue eyes: if you have blue eyes, it means you don’t have a recessive brown-eye gene.

All this was, apparently, my due. My legacy. My mother was endlessly boasting about my “intelligence,” encouraging me but never explaining why. It was as if she were signaling to me, “You’ll figure it out on your own, even if I can’t tell you what it is.” When I think of those years, I picture myself always at the same age, wearing my white cotton nightgown with its little broderie anglaise ruff. I liked to sit, protected by it, sniffing my knees. Watching.

Some years later, my mother got into the habit of preparing an “evening soup” for everyone, a ritual that would come to be considered perfectly normal, even expected. My aunt would drop by on her way home from the antiques store and slurp it down greedily, perched on a stool in the kitchen, before leaving without saying goodbye; my cousin would arrive and serve herself without asking. The time for interminable chatter was long past.

After a few years, I was put in charge of taking the soup over to my grandmother, who still lived in the right-hand wing of the circle formed by the three buildings. Pushing open the front door to her apartment, I would find her lying on her bed half naked—this was, clearly, a habit—having just given herself a shot of morphine, the needle still lodged in her buttock. “Adorable Herminette,” as my mother called her disingenuously, had crazy hair that made her look like Baba Yaga, the witch in the Russian fairy tale.

She would tell me, not very nicely, to go away and leave her alone. She had become dependent on opiates after being prescribed them in the wake of a painful operation. Her craving for them steadily increased, and now she could no longer do without. There were enough doctors in her entourage to indulge her with prescriptions. She wandered around her overheated apartment in a petticoat, doing nothing more than trying to avoid what she called “a collapse,” an agonizing attack that now occurred more and more frequently, sending her limbs into spasm. She called it her Saint Vitus’s dance. I would take the soup, untouched, back up to our apartment. My mother didn’t want to hear about it. It was enough that she fed all these people, just as she had “during the Occupation.”

Sometimes she told me about the train to Burgundy she took at dawn, the local man waiting for her at the station, the back of his van filled with lumps of coal. The journey back to Paris that same evening, carrying all the “butter-eggs-cheese” she had been able to persuade her cousins to give her. Twice a month, Lucie kept the family warmed and fed.

Any woman who was introduced to the family had to submit to the gynaeceum’s morning rituals. This happened to my brother’s first wife in 1970. She was encouraged to take off her clothes on the pretext that she had come over to try on some clothes. The young woman, not yet twenty, shy and confused, was scrutinized like a young filly by expert eyes. In her role of the new Naïve in the gynaeceum’s commedia dell’arte, she was felt up by hands as expert as those of a brothel madam. The way she responded dictated what was said about her. She was deemed “excellent.” Or not.

The women were not very pleasant even to one another.

“Sit up straight, you look like a hunchback.”

“Pull your stomach in.”

“I’m so swollen, I’m bulging out of my corset.”

They swapped clothes, then grabbed them back. No gift was definitive. “Look at this Liberty-print blouse. Why don’t you try it on? It fits you like a glove. Be careful taking it off!”—as if the most important thing about an item of clothing was its removal. It looked good when worn, but just as good unworn.

Then there were the words I heard uttered in one breath as if they formed a single word: “It’s-a-gift-from-Martine.” Martine was a friend and customer of my aunt who lived nearby.

“She didn’t wear it even once, she’s always buying clothes she never wears.” According to my aunt, Martine had a private income, and she purchased everything Zizi showed her in the store. She often spent the entire afternoon there, chatting, drinking tea, and munching the dry little biscuits Zizi rather meanly offered her.

“I love a little nibble,” my aunt would pretend, picking up a crumb from the floor and bringing it to her lips. Martine bought things without bargaining, barely even looking at them, and then, not content with having paid top dollar, came back with a bag of clothes for Zizi that she claimed she had no more use for. My aunt, twenty years her senior, would listen as she recounted yet another messy saga, interrupting every so often with indignant exclamations. “Men! Unbelievable. How dare he!”

It seemed to me that Martine’s problem was not men so much as the fact that she was an only child whose parents were dead, and everyone was after her money. My aunt knew all about that, including the story of the family’s hôtel particulier in the 16th arrondissement of Paris that had, puzzlingly, been turned into a prison camp during the Occupation. What Occupation? Who were the prisoners? Obviously, I never wondered this aloud. This was just one of the things left unsaid in my family; everyone was convinced that if things remained unspoken they did not exist. No one wanted to talk about the past except in vague generalizations that piqued my curiosity. Was it because Martine’s parents were dead that my aunt displayed such solicitude toward her, even while fleecing her unscrupulously of her money? Or was Zizi deliberately abusing her psychologically to get at her money, as though it were her due? My aunt was devious but not too bright, sentimental but not very sensitive; she always made out she was acting simply by instinct and intuition, two terms she employed without distinction. She was influenced by the signs of the zodiac. “I am a Scorpio,” she would declare assertively. “I’m particularly suited to Virgos.” She never specified if they were men or women.

In truth, nothing about Martine and their other benefactors was neutral in the eyes of the clan. Among themselves, they exaggerated the pronunciation of these women’s surnames as a way of reminding the assembled company—in case there was the slightest doubt—that they were Jewish, and thus, by definition, wealthy. And because these meetings were private, just family, recalling this was also a way of remembering, keeping the flame alive, reinforcing their loyalty to the clan. Meanwhile, nothing was made of the fact that these Jewish procurers—even now that they were adults—were orphans. Their parents had died, but how? When I asked, I was told they had been “deported,” a term whose meaning was vague to me, halfway between departed and transported. Where to? And why did they die? My mother gave me a long-winded answer that I didn’t really understand. She made the cold, bureaucratic information sound self-evident. Apparently this was the way things were for Jews. And Jews were, well, Jews.

Obviously no one ever mentioned genocide or the Holocaust, words I learned later from books. The women talked about “the war” as if the generic term was sufficient to account for the fate of individuals.

Martine’s function was, naturally, to be extravagant. That was the role of Jews in general: to give away, to part with their possessions. “Martine is so generous!” It was said with a hint of contempt. Truly, she was useless at managing and holding on to her money.

She committed suicide at the age of twenty-six, after a brief, unhappy marriage, celebrated in the Saint-Eustache church in Paris one freezing cold Saturday afternoon in December in the early 1970s. My mother and I were invited to the gloomy ceremony. Martine stood rapt before the altar, for once very slim, in a long white dress with a train and a sort of white bonnet with feathers that looked like something out of Swan Lake. The groom, older than she was, seemed distracted. The Franciscan priest kept waving his hands around in irritation. There were not many other guests. They divorced soon after.

My aunt sounded upset, even slightly annoyed, when she talked about her young benefactor’s death. She seemed mostly disappointed about the loss of the horn of plenty that had provided her with a steady stream of new clothes at no cost. With each new delivery she would toss the garments theatrically onto the floor, spreading them over the carpet in the middle of the ladies’ circle. The tribe would fall upon them, squabbling, pulling them on and tearing them off one another without a shred of modesty, sometimes layering several garments on top of one another. It was like an organized pillage, unbounded greed. Martine was always so generous!

The women closed ranks against the outside world. I had my place among them, as long as I didn’t get in the way. Every so often my mother would call on me for support: “You see! La petite agrees!” she would declare triumphantly.