Compelled by a silent force, I went into Una’s old room. There was now a double bed there, a wooden one painted red and blue, and toys carefully lined up, among which I angrily recognized some of my own. All the clothes were folded and put away in drawers and in the wardrobe. I quickly searched through the room looking for clues, letters, but found nothing. The family name written on the report cards was unknown to me, and seemed Aryan. These report cards went back a few years: so they had been living here for quite some time. I heard my mother behind me: “What are you doing?”—“I’m looking,” I said without turning round.—“You’d do better to go downstairs and cut wood as Aristide asked you. I’m going to get lunch ready.” I turned around: she was standing in the doorway, severe, impassive. “Who are these children?”—“I told you: the children of a close friend. We took them in when she couldn’t look after them anymore. They didn’t have a father.”—“How long have they been here?”—“A while. You left a long time ago too, my boy.” I looked around me, then stared at her again: “They’re little Jews, aren’t they? Admit it. They’re Jews, right?” She didn’t let herself be intimidated: “Stop talking nonsense. They’re not Jews. If you don’t believe me, just look at them when they’re taking their bath. That’s how you do it, isn’t it?”—“Yes. Sometimes that’s how we do it.”—“Anyway, even if they were Jews, what difference would that make? What would you to do them?”—“I wouldn’t do anything to them.”—“What do you do, with the Jews?” she went on. “We hear all kinds of horrors. Even the Italians say it’s not acceptable, what you’re doing.” I felt suddenly old, tired: “We send them to work, in the East. They build roads, houses, they work in factories.” She stuck to her guns: “And the children? You send them away to build roads? You take the children too, don’t you?”—“The children go to special camps. They stay with the mothers who can’t work.”—“Why do you do that?” I shrugged: “Someone had to do it. The Jews are parasites, exploiters: now they’re serving the people they used to exploit. And I should point out that the French help us a lot: in France, it’s the French police who arrest them and hand them over to us. It’s French law that decides. Someday, history will judge that we were right.”—“You are completely mad. Go cut the wood.” She turned around and headed to the side stairs. I went to put the three Burroughs books in my bag, then went out to the shed. I took off my jacket, picked up the axe, put a log on the block, and split it. It was difficult, I wasn’t used to this kind of work; I had to start over several times. As I raised the axe, I thought about my mother’s words; it wasn’t her lack of political comprehension that bothered me, it was the way she looked at me: What did she see, when she looked at me? I could feel the extent to which I labored under the weight of the past, of wounds received or imagined, of irreparable mistakes, of the unredeemability of time. Struggling against it did no good. When I got some logs finished, I loaded them up in my arms and carried them to the kitchen. My mother was peeling potatoes. I put the wood on the woodpile near the stove and went out again without a word, to split some more. I made several trips this way. As I worked, I thought: in the end, the collective problem of the Germans was the same as my own; they too were struggling to extract themselves from a painful past, to wipe the slate clean so they’d be able to begin new things. That was how they arrived at the most radical solution of them all: murder, the painful horror of murder. But was murder a solution? I thought of the many conversations I had had about this: in Germany, I wasn’t the only one to have my doubts. What if murder weren’t a definitive solution, what if on the contrary this new fact, even less reparable than the ones before it, opened in turn onto new abysses? Then, what way out was left? In the kitchen, I noticed I still had the axe with me. The room was empty: my mother must have been in the living room. I looked at the pile of wood; there seemed to be enough there. I was dripping with sweat; I put the axe in the corner next to the wood and went up to wash and change my shirt.

The meal passed in a dull silence. The twins were having lunch at school, there were just the three of us. Moreau tried to comment on the latest news—the Anglo-Americans were rapidly advancing toward Tunis; in Warsaw, some disturbances had broken out—but I obstinately kept silent. Looking at him, I said to myself: He’s a clever man, he must also keep in contact with the terrorists, and help them a little; if things get worse, he’ll say he was always on their side, that he worked with the Germans only as a cover. Whatever happens, he’ll be able to make his nest, that cowardly, toothless old lion. Even if the twins weren’t Jewish, I was sure he had hidden Jews: too good an opportunity, at so little cost (with the Italians, he wasn’t risking anything), to give himself an alibi for whatever comes later. But then a raging thought occurred to me: we’ll show him, him and everyone like him, what Germany is made of; we’re not finished yet. My mother too was silent. After the meal I told them I was going out for a walk. I crossed the grounds, passed the still-half-open gate and went down to the beach. On the path the salt smell of the sea blended strongly with that of the pines, and once again the past rose up in me, the happy past that had bathed in these fragrances, the unhappy past too. At the beach, I turned right, toward the harbor and the town. At the base of Fort Carré, on a strip of earth overlooking the sea and surrounded by stone pines, stretched a playground where some children were playing with a ball. When I was little I was a puny child, I didn’t like sports, I preferred reading; but Moreau, who thought I was sickly, had advised my mother to sign me up for a soccer club; so I too had played on this field. It wasn’t much of a success. Since I didn’t like to run, they made me the goalkeeper; one day, another child kicked the ball so hard into my chest that I was hurled to the back of the cage. I remember lying there on the ground, looking through the net at the tops of the pine trees waving in the breeze, until the coach finally came over to see if I had passed out. A little later we played our first game against another club. The team captain didn’t want me to play; finally, at the second halftime, he let me go out onto the field. I found myself, I’m not sure how, with the ball at my feet and began running toward the goal. In front of me, the empty field opened wide, the spectators were shouting, whistling, I didn’t see anything except this goal, the powerless goalkeeper trying to stop me and waving his arms, I was triumphing over everything and I scored, but it was an “own goal,” my own team’s goal. In the locker room, I was beaten by the other boys, and I gave up soccer. Beyond the fort, Port Vauban curves inward, a large natural cirque converted to a harbor, where fishing craft and patrol boats from the Italian navy were rocking. I sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette, watching the seagulls wheel around the fishing boats. Here, too, I had often come. There had been one walk in 1930, just before my baccalauréat, during Easter vacation. I had been avoiding Antibes for almost a year, since my mother’s marriage to Moreau, but for this vacation, she used a clever trick: she wrote to me, without any allusion to what had happened or to my letter full of insults, to tell me that Una was coming back for the vacation and would be delighted to see me. They had kept us apart for three years by then: those bastards, I said to myself, but I couldn’t refuse, and they knew it. Our reunion was awkward, we didn’t say much; of course my mother and Moreau practically never left us alone. When I arrived, Moreau had taken me by the arm: “No dirty business, okay? I’m keeping my eye on you.” To him, dense bourgeois that he was, it was obvious that I had seduced her. I didn’t say anything, but when she finally was there, I knew that I loved her more than ever. When, in the middle of the living room, she brushed me as she went by, the back of her hand touching mine for a fraction of a second, it was as if an electric shock riveted me to the floor; I had to bite my lip so as not to cry out. And then we went for a stroll around the harbor. Our mother and Moreau were walking in front of us, there, a few steps away from where I was sitting and remembering that moment; I spoke to my sister about my school, the priests, the corruption and the depraved habits of my classmates. I also told her I had been with boys. She smiled gently and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. Her own experiences hadn’t been much different, although the violence was more moral than physical. The nuns, she told me, were all neurotic, inhibited and frigid. I laughed and asked where she had learned these words; boarding school girls, she replied with a light, joyful laugh, now bribed the concierges so they would secretly smuggle them books not by Voltaire or Rousseau, but by Freud, Spengler, and Proust, and if I hadn’t read them yet, it was high time I started. Moreau stopped to buy us some ice-cream cones. But when he had rejoined our mother, we continued the conversation: this time, I talked about our father. “He’s not dead,” I whispered passionately.—“I know,” she said. “And even if he is, it’s not up to them to bury him.”—“It’s not a question of burial. It’s as if they had murdered him. Murdered him with paper. What a disgrace! For their shameful desires.”—“You know,” she said then, “I think she loves him.”—“I don’t give a damn!” I whispered. “She married our father and she’s his wife. That’s the truth. A judge can’t change any of that.” She stopped and looked at me: “You’re probably right.” But already our mother was calling us, and we walked toward her, licking our vanilla ice-cream cones.