Marlene Read Online Free PDF

cooked in a thousand ways …
    Nobody complained over these meager meals, the children even less than the grown-ups. If I was hungry, there were potatoes in the afternoon and in the evening. Potatoes, true friends of childhood. There they lay, white, tender and mealy, easy to eat and digest. They didn’t give us stomachaches. They were stillwarm when everything else on the table was already cold, arousing the anger of mothers, governesses, and aunts.
    We had no milk, but I didn’t miss it, and I knew no girl who did. In the summer we drank soda sweetened with saccharine when we were thirsty. In the morning we were given cocoa with water, and at home there was always water whenever we wanted it. Outside the house, however, it was considered impolite to ask for something to drink.
    Physical self-control was difficult to learn, but it would never have occurred to anybody at that time to grumble. Each one helped his or her neighbor and drew a lesson from this ordeal of fate. Grown-ups submitted to it calmly and with composure, and they set an extraordinary example for us children. We emulated them without any expectation of reward: No praise, no honors crowned our successes. Negligence was synonymous with sin: Neglecting the body, neglecting feelings and sentiments, neglecting compassion for others. In everything that concerned the body, neglect was called stupidity, and in relation to feelings, it was deemed unseemly. And when we sinned neither out of stupidity nor of impropriety, judgment was pronounced in a firm tone: “That’s not done.”
    Every time my mother wished to end a discussion, she would say: “Later you’ll be thankful to me.” Then I would argue further, but silently, since I had reached the age when you simply must contradict those who lay down the rules. I didn’t call the basic principles into question, of course. Only the unpleasant orders and the daily chores that appeared unnecessary or obsolete to me.
    The war had repealed many rules and habits. The country found itself in a state of emergency. The fact that our education continued as though we were still at peace prompted us to doubt the intelligence of grown-ups. We shook our heads, perplexed; we felt ourselves to be mature and wise, but at the same time powerless and ignorant.
    For example, the importance that my mother attached to lacing my shoes was really something exaggerated. Even after she had tied them very firmly to the very top, with an energetic finger, she would then pull out each hook up to the knot and re-do it allover again to make the shoelace really sit tight: “When you are bigger, you should have slender ankles, they must be supported so they don’t spread.” I certainly did not share her interest in my ankles. Nor did I like to wear laced boots or even to look at them. I considered my ankles my mother’s property, and all that I did for her a favor. Slender ankles and wrists had something to do with the “stable,” and that seemed to be important. I loved this childish feature in my mother; it brought her a little closer to me when she had lost her laughter and seemed to be so quiet and distant. To my regret I resembled my father. To me that was a misfortune.
    But my mother assured me that children who resemble their fathers are lucky children. My father: tall, imposing stature, leather smell, shining boots, a riding whip, horses. My remembrance was blurred, indistinct, enveloped in darkness by a power that did not permit a clear portrait of him. That power probably was death.
    I passively accepted this blurred portrait of my father whenever I was reminded of him. Most of my schoolmates no longer had fathers. We didn’t miss them, we hardly grasped that they had gone forever.
    We lived in a women’s world; the few men with whom we came in contact were old or ill, not real men. The genuine men were at the front, they were fighting until they fell. After the war many