by Judith Kerr
Suddenly Max said, “What is that funny light in the sky?”
It was the dawn.
By this time they had reached the main Paris market, and carts loaded with fruit and vegetables were rumbling over the cobblestones all about them.
“Hungry?” asked Monsieur Fernand.
It was ridiculous since they had already eaten two suppers, but everyone was starving. There was no accordion music here, only people getting ready for the day’s work, and a woman in a small café was serving bowls of steaming onion soup. They ate great bowlfuls, sitting on wooden benches with the market people, and mopped up the remains with hunks of bread. When they came out of the café it was daylight.
“Now you can put the children to bed,” said Monsieur Fernand. “They have seen the fourteenth of July.”
After a sleepy farewell they rode home on the Metro among late revellers like themselves and people going to work, and collapsed into their beds.
“We never had a fourteenth of July in Germany,” said Anna just before she fell asleep.
“Well, of course not,” said Max. “We didn’t have the French Revolution!”
“I know that,” said Anna crossly and added, just as sleep was about to overtake her, “But wasn’t it lovely!”
Then the summer holidays were upon them. Just as they were wondering how to spend them, a letter arrived from Herr Zwirn inviting the whole family to the Gasthof Zwirn as his guests—and just as they were wondering where to get the money for the fares, Papa was asked to write three articles for a French newspaper. This paper paid him so much more than his normal fees from the Daily Parisian that it solved the problem.
Everyone was delighted at the prospect, and to top it all on the last day of term Max brought home a good report. Mama and Papa could hardly believe their eyes when they saw it. There was not a single “Does not try” or “Shows no interest”. Instead there were words like “intelligent” and “hard-working” and the headmaster’s comment at the bottom of the sheet said that Max had made remarkable progress. This made Mama feel so cheerful that she absent-mindedly bade quite a fond farewell to Grete, who was going back to Austria at last. They were all so pleased to get rid of her that they felt they must be extra nice to her, and Mama even gave her a small scarf.
“I don’t know if this sort of thing is worn in Austria,” said Grete glumly when she saw it, but she took it anyway. And then they themselves set off for Switzerland.
The Gasthof Zwirn was quite unchanged. Herr and Frau Zwirn were as kind and warm-hearted as ever, and after the heat in Paris the air by the lake was wonderfully fresh. It was nice to hear the familiar German-Swiss dialect and to be able to understand everything people said instead of only half, and Franz and Vreneli were ready to pick up their friendships with Anna and Max exactly where they had left off. In no time at all Vreneli was bringing Anna up to date about the red-haired boy who had apparently taken to looking at Vreneli in a certain way—a warm sort of way, said Vreneli—which she could not describe but which appeared to please her. Franz carried Max off to fish with the same old fishing rod, and they all played the same games and walked along the same paths in the woods which they had enjoyed so much the previous year. It was all exactly as it had been, and yet there was something about this very sameness that made Anna and Max feel a little like strangers. How could the Zwirns’ lives have stayed so much the same when their own had become so different?
“You’d think just something would have changed,” said Max, and Franz asked, “What sort of thing?” But Max did not know himself.
One day Anna was walking through the village with Vreneli and Roesli when they met Herr Graupe.
“Welcome back to our beautiful Switzerland!” he cried, shaking her hand enthusiastically, and soon he was asking her all sorts of questions about school in France. He was convinced that nothing could compare with his own village school and Anna found herself sounding almost apologetic when she explained that she liked it all very much.
“Really?” said Herr Graupe incredulously, while she described the work, and her lunches with Clothilde in the school kitchen, and Madame Socrate.
And then an odd thing happened to her. Herr Graupe was asking her something about the French school-leaving age which she did not know—but instead of telling him so in German she found herself suddenly shrugging her shoulders and saying “Je ne sais pas” in her best Parisian accent. She was horrified as soon as she had said it. She knew he would think that she was showing off. But she hadn’t been. She could not even understand where the words had come from. It was as though somewhere inside her something were secretly thinking in French—and that was ridiculous. Since she had never been able to think in French in Paris, why should she suddenly start now?
“I see we’re becoming quite French already,” said Herr Graupe disapprovingly when they had both recovered from their surprise at her reply. “Well—I mustn’t keep you.” And he hurried off.
Vreneli and Roesli were both unusually quiet when the three of them walked back together.
“I suppose you can speak French like anything now,” said Vreneli at last.
“No,” said Anna. “Max is much better.”
“I can say Oui—I think that means Yes, doesn’t it?” said Roesli. “Are there any mountains in France?”
“Not near Paris,” said Anna.
Vreneli had been staring at Anna thoughtfully. Then she said, “You know, you’re different somehow.”
“I’m not!” said Anna indignantly.
“But you are,” said Vreneli. “I don’t know what it is but you’ve changed.”
“Nonsense!” cried Anna. “Of course I haven’t!” But she knew that Vreneli was right and suddenly, though she was only eleven, she felt quite old and sad.
The rest of the holidays passed happily enough. The children bathed and played with the Zwirns, and if it was not quite as it had been it was still very pleasant. After all, what did it matter, said Max, that they no longer quite belonged? They were sorry to leave at the end of the summer and took a long and affectionate farewell from their friends. But to both Anna and Max, going back to Paris felt more like going home than they would ever have thought possible.
Chapter Nineteen
When Anna went back to school she found that she had been moved up. Madame Socrate was still her teacher but the work was suddenly much harder. This was because her class was preparing for an examination called the certificat d’études which everyone except Anna was taking the following summer.
“I’m excused because I’m not French,” Anna told Mama, “and anyway I couldn’t possibly pass.”
But she had to do the work just the same.
The girls in her class were expected to do at least an hour’s home-work each day after school, to learn whole pages of history and geography by heart, to write essays and study grammar—and Anna had to do it all in a language which she still did not completely understand. Even arithmetic which had been her great stand-by now let her down. Instead of sums which needed no translation her class were doing problems—long complicated tangles in which people dug ditches and passed each other in trains and filled tanks with water at one rate while siphoning it off at another—and all this she had to translate into German before she could even begin to think about it.
As the weather became colder and the days darker she began to feel very tired. She dragged her feet walking home from school and then just sat and stared at her home-work instcad of getting on with it. She suddenly felt quite discouraged. Madame Socrate, mindful of the coming exam, no longer had so much time for her, and her work seemed to be getting worse rather than better. No matter what she did, she could not reduce the mistakes in her dictations below forty—lately they had even climbed up again into the fifties. In class, even though she often knew the answers, it took her so long to translate them into French in her mind that it was usually too late to give them. She felt that she would never be able to catch up and was getting tired of trying.
One day when she was sitting over her home-work Mama came into the room.
“Have you nearly finished?” she asked.
“Not quite,” said Anna, and Mama came and looked at her book.
It was arithmetic home-work and all Anna had written was the date and “Problems” at the top of the page. She had drawn a little box-shape round “Problems” with a ruler and had followed this with a wavy line in red ink. Then she had decorated the wavy line with dots and surrounded it with a zigzag shape and more dots in blue. All this had taken her the best part of an hour.
At the sight of it Mama exploded.
“No wonder you can’t do your home-work!” she shouted.
“You put it off and put it off until you’re too tired to make any sense of it! You’ll never learn anything at this rate!”
This was so exactly what Anna felt herself that she burst into tears.
“I do try!” she sobbed. “But I just don’t seem to be able to do it. It’s too difficult! I try and try and it isn’t any use!”
And in another burst of weeping she dripped tears all over “Problems” so that the paper cockled and the wavy line spread and got mixed up with the zig-zag.
“Of course you can do it!” said Mama, reaching for the book. “Look, if I help you ...”
But Anna shouted “No!” quite violently and pushed the book away so that it shot off the table and on to the floor.
“Well, you’re obviously in no condition to do any home-work today,” said Mama after a moment’s silence and walked out of the room.
Anna was just wondering what she ought to do when Mama came back again with her coat on.
“I have to buy some cod for supper,” she said. “You’d better come with me and get some fresh air.”
They walked down the street together without talking. It was cold and dark and Anna trudged along beside Mama with her hands in her pockets, feeling quite empty. She was no good. She would never be able to speak French properly. She would be like Grete who had never managed to learn, but unlike Grete she could not go home to her own country. At this thought she began to blink and sniff all over again, and Mama had to grab her arm to stop her bumping into an old lady.
The fish shop was some distance away in a brightly lit, busy street. There was a cake shop next to it, its window filled with creamy delicacies which you could either take away or sit down to eat at one of the little tables inside. Anna and Max had often admired it, but neither had ever set foot inside it because it was so expensive. This time Anna was too miserable even to look at it, but Mama stopped by the heavy glass door.
“We’ll go in here,” she said to Anna’s surprise and steered her through.
They were met by a wave of warm air and a delicious smell of pastries and chocolate.
“I’ll have a cup of tea and you can have a cake,” said Mama, “and then we’ll have a talk.”
“Isn’t it too expensive?” asked Anna in a small voice.
“We can manage one cake,” said Mama. “But you’d better not pick one of those absolutely enormous ones, otherwise we might not have enough money left for the cod.”
Anna chose a pastry filled with sweet chestnut purée and whipped cream, and they sat down at one of the little tables.
“Look,” said Mama as Anna sank her fork into the cake, “I know it’s difficult for you at school and I know you’ve tried. But what are we to do? We’re living in France and you have to learn French.”
“I get so tired,” said Anna, “and I’m getting worse instead of better. Perhaps I’m just one of those people who can’t learn languages.”
Mama was up in arms at once.
“Nonsense!” she said. “There’s no such thing at your age!”
Anna tried a bit of her pastry. It was delicious.
“Would you like some?” she said.
Mama shook her head.
“You’ve done very well so far,” she said after a moment. “Everyone tells me your French accent is perfect, and you really know an awful lot considering that we’ve been here less than a year.”
“It’s just that now I don’t seem to be able to get any further,” said Anna.
“But you will!” said Mama.
Anna looked down at her plate.
“Look,” said Mama, “these things don’t always happen as you expect. When I was studying music I sometimes struggled with something for weeks without getting anywhere at all—and then suddenly, just when I felt it was quite hopeless, the whole thing became clear and I couldn’t think why I hadn’t seen it before. Perhaps it will be like that with your French.”
Anna said nothing. She did not think it was very likely.
Then Mama seemed to come to a decision.
“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” she said. “It’s only two months till Christmas. Will you try just once more? Then if by Christmas you really feel you still can’t manage, we’ll do something about it. I don’t quite know what, because we have no money for school fees, but I promise you I’ll think of something. All right?”
“All right,” said Anna.
The cake really was remarkably good, and by the time she had finished the last lick of chestnut purée she felt a lot less like Grete than before. They stayed sitting at the little table for a while longer because it was such a pleasant place to be.
“Nice to go out to tea with my daughter,” said Mama at last and smiled.
Anna smiled back.
The bill came to more than they had expected and there was not enough money left for the cod after all, but Mama bought mussels instead and it did not matter. In the morning she gave Anna a note to Madame Socrate to explain about the home-work and she must have put something else in it as well, for Madame Socrate told Anna not to worry about school and also found time again to help her during the lunch break.
After this the work did not seem quite so bad. Whenever it threatened to overwhelm her, Anna remembered that if she really found it impossible she would not have to go on trying for ever, and then she usually discovered that she could manage after all.
And then, one day, her whole world changed.
It was a Monday morning and Colette met Anna at the school gates.
“What did you do on Sunday?” she called—and instead of mentally translating the question into German, deciding on an answer and then translating that back into French, Anna called back, “We went to see our friends.”
The words just seemed to arrive from nowhere, in perfect French, without her having to think at all. She was so astonished that she stood quite still and did not even hear Colette’s next question.
“I said,” shouted Colette, “did you take the cat out?”
“No, it was too wet,” said Anna—again in perfect French and without thinking.
It was like a miracle. She could not believe that it would last. It was as though she had suddenly found that she could fly, and she expected each moment to crash to the ground again. With her heart beating faster than usual she went into the classroom—but her new talent persisted.
In the first lesson she answered four questions correctly, so that Madame Socrate looked at her in surprise and said, “Well done!” She chattered and laughed with Colette in break and during lunch she explained to Clothilde how Mama cooked liver and onions. Once or twice she still hesitated, and of course she made mistakes. But most of the time she was able to speak French just as she spoke German—automatically and without thinking. By the end of the day she was almost light-headed with excitement but not at all tired, and when she woke up the next morning she had a moment of utter terror. Suppose her new gift had vanished as suddenly as it had come? But she need not have worried. When she got to school she found that she was even more fluent than before.
By the end of the week Mama looked at her in amazement.
“I’ve never seen such a change in anyone,” she said. “A few days ago you looked green and miserable. Now it’s as though you’d grown five centimetres and you look q
uite pink. What’s happened to you?”
“I think I’ve learned to speak French,” said Anna.
Chapter Twenty
There was even less money to spend at Christmas than the previous year, but it was more fun because of the Fernands. The main celebration in France is not at Christmas but on New Year’s Eve when even the children are allowed to stay up till midnight, and they all had a special dinner and exchanged presents at the Fernands’ flat. Anna had used some of her pocket money to buy some chocolate as a present for the white cat and after dinner, instead of playing with Max and Francine, she stayed behind in the living-room to feed it small crumbs of chocolate on the floor. Mama and Madame Fernand were washing up the dishes in the kitchen and Papa and Monsieur Fernand were drinking brandy and having one of their endless conversations, deep in two armchairs.
Papa seemed very interested in what they were talking about, and Anna was pleased because ever since that morning when a postcard had arrived from Onkel Julius, he had been silent and depressed. There had been postcards from Onkel Julius at irregular intervals throughout the year and though there was never any real news in them they were always full of affection. Sometimes there were little jokes and always there were messages for “Aunt Alice” to which Papa replied. This card had been addressed to Anna as usual but there was no mention of “Aunt Alice”—not even any good wishes for the New Year. Instead, on the back of a picture of some bears, Onkel Julius had simply written, “The more I see of men the more I love animals.” He had not even initialled it as usual, but they knew it was from him because of his beautiful neat handwriting.
