other major American connection was Papa’s automobile, an olive green 1941 DeSoto Series S-8 Custom Coupe that Papa bragged had once belonged to the cultural attaché of the Canadian Embassy.
The car dwarfed its Parisian counterparts, belched clouds of blue smoke, stank of gasoline, ran only on moderately sunny days, and menaced the rest of traffic. The brakes worked when pumped precisely four times in rapid succession. The blinkers did not blink, the tires were bald, and the clutch was worn and wheezed. To start the DeSoto in the winter, Papa would light a newspaper fire beneath the hood to warm the carburetor. The car was his joy and, by osmosis, that of Sergei Kharkov, the concierge.
Kharkov washed the car every Friday. Jeanot once helped him, lugging buckets of soapy water from the courtyard to the street.
“A magnificent car,” Kharkov told him as they were cleaning the wheels with soap and a stiff brush.
“Papa sometimes curses when he tries to start it, especially when it’s cold. He says bad words in English.”
The concierge nodded. “Well now, that makes perfect sense. Cursing in French at an English-speaking car serves no purpose at all.”
Jeanot thought Kharkov was pretty sharp. “Do you speak English, Monsieur Kharkov?”
“Of course,” said the concierge, and recited his favorite words. “Beaver coat, amber waves of grain, special skies, to be or not to be.” He paused, scrubbed. “I know a lot more, of course. But those are the words everyone must know in America.”
“Papa says you should also know, ‘Hello, I am lost, my name is Jeanot.’ But not in your case. You’d have to say, ‘My name is Monsieur Kharkov.’”
Then they dried the DeSoto’s hood and sides with a chamois cloth, scrubbed the bald tires, swept out the inside with a straw broom, polished the chrome and cleaned the windshield with a mixture of ammonia and soap.
In exchange for these services, Papa allowed the Russian to sit in the passenger seat while the car was parked, looking like a man impatiently waiting for something or someone important. Kharkov was not allowed to smoke his cigarettes in the car. It was a small sacrifice. Kharkov ate his lunch in the DeSoto, gossiped with his Russian friends, who knew where to find him every day from noon to two, ogled girls who passed by, and if he noticed that Jeanot was around, entertained him with his deep knowledge of America.
“They all wear hats. Except the Indians, of course, who wear feathers and mink tails in their hair,” he assured the boy. That sounded good. Jeanot saw himself in a hat like Gene Autry’s, or wearing a Blackfoot headdress made of eagle and pigeon feathers. He wasn’t sure about the mink tails. Tatie, his great aunt who lived in St. Germain and visited twice a month, wore a ratty fox collar with tails and heads attached and he wouldn’t be caught dead in that.
“And they’re all rich,” said the Russian. “But then,” he made a face the boy had seen whenever France was mentioned, “it’s easy to get rich over there. Not like this damned shitty hell hole of a country.”
Kharkov had a wide-ranging collection of books, magazines, photographs and records dedicated to America, which he allowed Jeanot to inspect.
He referred to these often when declaring his expansive knowledge of the United States. Thoughts of that almost mythical nation—he sometimes called his library “The Church of America”—softened his usually harsh features. He smoked American-made Camel cigarettes when he could afford them and when he couldn’t, filled empty Camel packs with hand-rolled mixtures of Turkish, Algerian, and Gitane tobacco. He field-stripped the butts, kept what was smokable and re-rolled them so that he gave off a smell Oncle Répaud likened to a barnyard on fire after a rainstorm.
Back in the concierge loge, Jeanot hung onto the Russian’s every word about America. Kharkov looked around as if making sure no one could overhear him and whispered, “But the great secret of Americans is that they have very tiny zizis. It’s a fact. One centimeter, maybe two if they’re fortunate. And that,” he paused for emphasis, illustrating a two centimeter span with his thumb and forefinger, “is why American women always want to come to Europe.”
This made no sense to Jeanot, who nodded his head anyway. He knew what a zizi was, but the relationship between zizis and women was unclear. As far as Jeanot was aware, zizis were the province of men only, although in America, of course, things might be different.
“A lot of Americans have six toes,” the Russian concierge continued, “which is why they run so fast. The extra toe makes them more stable. Jesse Owens has seven toes on his right foot; that’s how he won the Olympics. It is also why Hitler hated him. Hitler only had four toes, and one tiny ball that, according to what I’ve heard, never worked at all.”
Now that made perfect sense. There was a kid in Jeanot’s class who was thumbless and had the devil of a time writing without making huge ink spots all over his notebook. The kid shook so much no one wanted to sit next to him; he sprayed ink in all directions. It was said his palsy came from mono-ballism.
“The Americans come from all over the world,” said the concierge. “But it’s easy to tell them apart. The short ones who smell bad are either Italian or Greek, though sometimes they’re Irish. If they smell bad and work in a restaurant, they’re Italian. Most Russians are teachers or musicians, unless they’re Jews, in which case they sell clothing in the streets. I have photos of this. Generally, it’s very cheap clothing, nothing a civilized man would wear so they sell them to the Chinese and to the Africans. In any case, the Russian Jews are very good business people, so watch your pockets. There are a lot of Africans and Chinese, but not in the big cities.”
“And the French?” asked the boy. “What do they do in America?”
The Russian shrugged his shoulders. “The same as they do here. Next to nothing, the lazy bastards. Des bons à rien.”
Jeanot felt he had to defend his countrymen, an easy task since that week’s Tintin had been devoted to the greatness of French inventions. “But we invented the airplane, and the telephone, and radium, and cheese.”
The Russian scoffed. “All those are Russian, except maybe the cheese.”
Kharkov apparently knew everything there was to know about America, France and Russia.
Once a month or so, Papa drove Kharkov around to impress the less affluent emigrés, and on two or three occasions Jeanot was permitted to ride along, provided he kept his mouth shut. Dressed in his best clothes and topped with a faded black homburg that gave him a sinister look, Kharkov would treat Papa like a chauffeur, projecting so much hauteur that Jeanot pictured him as a Russian Czar. Papa drove to the Russian épicerie, where Kharkov gossiped with the owner and bought a small bottle of cheap vodka, to the pharmacie for pills that promised eyesight improvements, and slowly past the Russian tea room on avenue Foche.
One time, a few days after the spud gun party, Papa and Kharkov took Jeanot along and the Russian gave the boy a swig from a vodka bottle. Papa stopped the car with a squeal of tires, opened the passenger door and shoved the Russian out. It was many months before the Russian was allowed in the DeSoto again.
Chapter 4
Jeanot’s great aunt Tatie owned a house in St. Germain en Laye near a large public park abutting a château.
It was called the Château de Neuilly, and its surrounding grounds were a maze of wide yellow gravel-covered avenues that crisscrossed 170 acres of grass, trees, streams and ponds. Jeanot had been there dozens of times, once
