Page 2 of Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt
Not speaking is no hardship. It is over a year since I left the home I had known for as long as I could remember. In that time, I’ve only used my voice when absolutely necessary.
From where I am writing this, I can look out of the tiny attic window. Earlier, I watched the Landowski children come up the path. They had been to school and looked very smart in their uniforms – Françoise in white gloves and a straw hat they call a boater, and her brothers in white shirts and blazers. Even if I hear Monsieur Landowski complaining often abouthis lack of money, the big house, his lovely garden and the beautiful dresses that the ladies of the house wear tell me he must be very rich indeed.
I’ve also chewed my pencil, a habit Papa tried to prevent me from continuing by putting all sorts of terrible flavours on the end of it. He once told me the day’s flavour tasted quite nice but was poison, so if I put it anywhere near my mouth, I would die. Yet still, as I thought about the translation he’d given me to decipher, into my mouth the pencil had gone. I’d heard a scream as he’d seen me, and I’d been taken outside by the scruff of the neck and my mouth packed with snow, which I then had to spit out. I didn’t die, but I’ve often wondered since whether it was just a harsh ruse to shock me into stopping or whether the snow and the spitting had saved me.
Even though I do my best to remember him, it is so many years since I last saw him and he is fading from my mind...
Perhaps it is for the best. Yes, best in every way that I forget everything that has gone before. Then, if they torture me, I will have nothing to tell them. And if Monsieur or Madame Landowski think that I shall write things down in the diary they have so kindly given me, trusting to the little lock with a key that I can keep in my leather pouch, then they are sorely mistaken.
‘A diary is a place in which you can write down anything you feel or think,’ Madame Landowski had explained gently. ‘It is also a place of privacy, for your eyes only. I promise that we shall never look.’
I had nodded profusely, then smiled my gratitude with my eyes, before running upstairs to my attic bedroom. I do not believe her. I know from experience how both locks and promises can be so easily broken.
I promise on your beloved mother’s life that I shall return for you... Pray for me, wait for me...
I am shaking my head, trying to lose the memory of Papa’s last words to me. Yet somehow, even though others I wish to recall float like dandelion seeds away from my brain’s grasp the minute I try to harness them, that sentence will not budge whatever I do.
Still, the diary is leather-bound, and full of the thinnest of paper. It must have cost the Landowskis at least a franc (which is what they call their money here), and it was, I think, a gesture made to help me, so I shall use it. Besides, even though I have learnt not to talk, I often wondered on my long journey whether I might forget how to write. Having no paper or pencil with me, one of the ways I’d get through those freezing winter nights was to recite passages of poetry in my head, then imagine writing the letters in ‘my mind’s eye’.
I very much like that phrase – Papa had called it the window to our imagination and, when I wasn’t reciting poetry, I would often disappear into that cavernous place that Papa said contained no boundaries. It was as large as you wished it to be. Small-minded men, he’d added, had, by definition, a limited imagination.
And even if the kind Landowskis were proving to be my human saviours, tending to the outer me, I still needed to disappear inside myself, screw my eyes up tight and think thoughts that could never be written down because I could never trust another human being again.
Therefore, I thought,what the Landowskis would get if any of them ever read this –and part of me was sure that they would try, just out of curiosity if nothing else –is a diary that began on the day that I had already said my last prayers.
In fact, maybe I had never said them; I had been so delirious with fever, starvation and exhaustion that perhaps I dreamt it – but anyway, it was the day that I had gazed into the most beautiful female face I had ever seen.
As I wrote an abridged, factual paragraph on how the beautiful lady had taken me in, whispered words of endearment and allowed me to sleep indoors for the first time in heaven knows how long, I thought about how sad she had looked the last time I’d seen her. I had since discovered her name was Izabela – Bel for short. She and Landowski’s atelier assistant, Monsieur Brouilly (who’d asked me to call him Laurent, not that in my current state of dumbness I’d call him anything at all), had fallen madly in love. And that night, when she looked sad, she had come to say goodbye. Not just to me, but to him too.
Even though I was very young, I had actually read quite a lot about love. After Papa had left, I’d worked my way through his bookshelf and learnt some extraordinary things about the ways of grown-ups. At first, I had presumed that the physical act which was being described must make the story a comedy in some ways, but then when it had been repeated by authors I knew were definitely not humorists, I’d realised that it must be true. Nowthatwas something I definitely wouldn’t be writing about in my diary!
A small chuckle escaped my lips and I slapped my hands to my mouth. It felt so strange, because a chuckle was an expression of some level of happiness. The physical body’s natural response.
‘Goodness!’ I whispered. It was odd to hear my own voice, which seemed deeper than the last time I’d uttered a word. No one would hear me up here in the attic; both the maids were downstairs scrubbing, polishing and working through the endless laundry that hung on the ropes tethered at the back of the house. Anyway, even if they couldn’t hear me up here, it was a habit I mustn’t get into, this happiness thing, because if I could chuckle, then it meant I had a voice and could definitely speak. I tried to think of things to make mesad, which really did feel very odd, given that the only way I seemed to – against all the odds – have made it to France was by disappearing into my imagination and thinking happy thoughts. I thought about the two maids, who I could always hear chattering through the thin wall that separated us at night. They complained that their pay was terrible, the hours too long, their mattresses lumpy and their attic bedroom freezing in winter. I wanted to hammer on the thin wall and shout that they should feel so lucky that there was a wall separating me and them, that the family did not all live together in a single room, that theyhadwages, however bad they were. And as for saying that their rooms were cold in winter... well, I had studied the climate of France, and even though Paris, which I’d discovered we were on the very edges of, was in the north, the thought of a couple of degrees below zero being a problem made me want to chuckle all over again.
I finished the first paragraph in my brand-new ‘official’ diary and read it back to myself, pretending that I was Monsieur Landowski who was reading it, with his funny little beard and big bushy moustache.
I live in Boulogne-Billancourt. I have been taken in by the kind Landowski family. Their names are Monsieur and Madame Paul and Amélie Landowski, and their children are Nadine (20), Jean-Max (17), Marcel (13) and Françoise (11). They are all very kind to me. They tell me I have been very ill and it will take time to get my strength back up. The maids are named Elsa and Antoinette, and the cook is Berthe. She is always offering me more and more of her beautiful patisserie, to fatten me up, she says. The first time she gave me a full plate, I ate every morsel on it and then I was violently sick five minutes later. When the doctor cameto see me, he told Berthe that my stomach had shrunk through malnutrition and she must give me smaller plates of food, or I could get very sick again and die. I think this upset Berthe, but I hope that now I am almost eating properly again I am also appreciating her cooking. There’s a member of staff I have not yet met, but who the family talk about a lot. Her name is Madame Evelyn Gelsen, and she is the housekeeper. She is on holiday at the moment, visiting her son, who lives in Lyon.
I am worried that I am costing this kind family money, what with all the food I now eat, plus the doctor having to come out and visit me. I know how expensive doctors can be. I have no money and no occupation and I can’t see a way of paying them back, which of course they will expect and is the right thing to do. I am not sure how long I will be allowed to stay here, but I try to enjoy every day in their beautiful home. I thank the Lord for their kindness and pray for them every night.
My teeth crunched down on the end of the pencil as I nodded with satisfaction. I had made the language simplistic, adding the odd basic spelling mistake just to make me look like I was a normal ten-year-old boy. It wouldn’t do to let them know what kind of education I had once received. After Papa had left, I’d done my best to keep up my lessons as he’d urged me to do, but without him as my guide, things in that department had suffered rather.
Pulling out a beautiful sheet of clean white paper from the drawer in the old desk – and to me, having a drawer and a writing space all of my own was beyond any luxury I’d ever imagined – I began to write a letter.
Landowski Atelier
Rue Moisson Desroches
Boulogne-Billancourt
7th August 1928
Dear Monsieur and Madame Landowski,
I wish to say thank you to you both for your gift. It is the most beautiful diary I’ve ever owned and I will write in it every day, as you asked me.
Also, thank you for having me.
