Read Online Shhh by Raymond Federman - Free Book Online

father would get stuff from the black market for the German soldiers, and how they would bring us food, and how in the evening German soldiers came to our house to discuss politics with my father, and how I would go to the store to buy bottles of beer for the German soldiers, and how before leaving late in the evening, they would all raise their left fist and together with my father they would sing the International, and me too, I would sing with them in a soft voice. The German soldiers who came to our house were all Communists, like my father. My father explained to me that the best place for German Communists to hide was in the army.
    12. Scene demonstrating how verisimilitude often becomes improbable when one tells a story.
    13. Scene describing the Argentan Lycée where I got my certificat d’études, and how the boys used to fight with chestnuts that fell from the trees that surrounded the school playground, and how I would also throw chestnuts at them.
    14. Scene describing how, during the very cold winter we spent in Argentan, one day the German soldiers who came to discuss politics with my father unloaded a whole truck of coal in front of our house, and how all the neighbors were saying that we were collaborators.
    15. Scene describing how the children in Argentan played on the big square in front of the church where the Germans had piled up the gas masks and the rifles and the helmets abandoned by the retreating French army.
    16. Explain how, when the war started, all the people in the cities had to carry a gas mask everywhere they went. Even the children.
    17. Scene describing the night when the tannery in front of our house caught fire, and how all the people in our street had to be evacuated, and how the firemen fought the fire, and how I wished our house would also burn so we could move away from this neighborhood.
    18. Describe how, after the burnt factory had been completely demolished, we had a view of the whole city from the window of our apartment on the third floor.
    19. Describe the wasteland— La Zone, as it was called—between Porte D’Orléans and Montrouge, and how the Arabs from the colonies, we called them Les Sidis, slept in this no-man’s land in cardboard boxes or wrapped in newspapers, and how the people who had to cross the Zone to get home were scared of them.
    20. Scene revealing how I masturbated in my bed or in the hot house in the courtyard, and how once my mother caught me doing it, and told me that if I continued to do that I would become blind.
    21. Scene describing how at the beginning of the war, before the Germans arrived in Paris, during a bombardment alert, my father and I stood at the open window of our apartment to watch the German planes bombard the Renault factory in Malakoff. It was like the fireworks on Bastille day. My mother, before going down to the shelter with my sisters, and the other people in the building, shouted at my father to go down to the shelter, but my father refused, and I was proud to stay with him during the entire alert.
    22. Describe how on Sunday, my mother, my sisters, and I would walk from Montrouge all the way to Rue Vercingétorix in the 14 th arrondissement, to have lunch at my grandmother’s with the aunts, uncles, and cousins, and how my sisters and I always complained that it was too far to go, and that we should take the subway or the autobus, because our feet hurt, and how my mother would tell us we could not afford the metro or the autobus, and how my father never came with us on Sunday because everybody in my mother’s side of the family hated him.
    23. Tell how when we walked home to Montrouge after the visit to my grandmother’s, we always went before it was dark because we were afraid of the Sidis in the Zone.
    24. Tell how, when I was old enough to take the subway alone to go visit my aunts on my father’s side and play with their children who lived in the Jewish neighborhood of Le Marais, I