Shhh by Raymond Federman

with the other boys my age, even though I rarely won. But the most important things I kept under my bed were my Jules Verne books. Ah, Jules Verne! Sometimes, during the night, when my parents were asleep, I would read one of Jules Verne’s books under the blankets with a little flashlight.
    My favorite was Michel Strogoff. I kept rereading it. I wanted to be like Michel Strogoff. I wanted to have my eyes burned like his by the inflamed sword of a Russian Cossack of the Tzar’s army. I also wanted to go around the world in eighty days, and to the moon, and to the center of the earth, and to the bottom of the sea. I had all the Jules Verne, but also other adventure books. Especially cloak-and-dagger novels. My parents could not afford to buy me these books, so I would have to wait until my cousin Salomon had finished reading his so he could give them to me. They were not always in good condition, but still I wanted them. Salomon didn’t really care to keep his books. He always got everything he wanted. The aunts and uncles would spoil him just because he was the first of all the cousins.
    He also had a lot of comic books, but he was not allowed to read them until he finished his homework and his piano lessons. If Leon caught him reading a comic book before he was finished, Leon would really get angry.
    Sometimes, when Salomon was upstairs doing his homework, and his parents were working downstairs in the atelier, he would send me to buy comic books for him. I had to hide them inside my pants to bring them back upstairs.
    To go up into the house, I had to pass in front of Leon’s atelier, and if my uncle saw me trying to sneak by the window, he would shout, Come here, you little coward and let me see what you’re hiding in your pants. Leon had caught me several times with comic books hidden inside my pants against my stomach, and each time I had to explain that it was Salomon who sent me to get them. I would go buy those comic books for my cousin because I knew that when he’d be finished reading them I would get them.
    So I stood piteously in front of my uncle Leon while he shoved his hand inside my pants and pulled out Les Pieds-Nickelés or Mandrake le magicien or Tarzan or Tintin, and many others like that.
    Leon would throw the comics into the garbage can, and then he would step out into the courtyard and call out to Salomon to come down, and when my cousin came into the atelier Leon would slap him hard across the face. There was such anger in Leon’s eyes, it frightened me. But he never hit me. It was always Salomon who got it because of the comic books.
    I’ll tell you more about my cousin Salomon when I am finished describing our apartment.
    It’s in my cot that I masturbated for the first time. And often after that. I’ll have to tell that too later. Sorry to mention it, but it was something I did when I was growing up. It was part of my childhood. And I suppose part of every boy’s childhood.
    Behind the curtain where my parents slept, there was a nightstand on my father’s side of the bed on which he kept his personal things. His medicine, his wallet, his watch, his cigarettes. Even though he had tuberculosis, my father smoked all the time. Gitanes without filters. In those days, cigarettes didn’t have filters. Sometimes my father would send me to the bureau de tabac at the corner of our street to buy his cigarettes.
    On the side of the bed where my mother slept, there was a small, narrow closet in which our clothes were stored and where my parents kept their private papers in cardboard boxes.
    I made this long descriptive detour of our apartment just to arrive at this closet which was not the closet into which my mother hid me.
    That closet was on the landing. In it we kept things we didn’t need every day.
    When I returned to Montrouge at the end of the war, after the three miserable years I spent on the farm in Southern France, I discovered that everything