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Boulogne. The lake and the floating dock from which one embarked for the miniature golf course and the Chalet des Iles … One evening, at the Bois, we were waiting for the bus home and my father dragged us into narrow Rue Adolphe-Yvon. He stopped in front of a private hotel and said, “I wonder who’s living here now,” as if he knew the place. I saw him in his office that evening, combing through the street directory. I was intrigued. A decade or so later, I learned that during the Occupation, 6 Rue Adolphe-Yvon, a private hotel that is no longer standing (I returned to that street in 1967 to verify the spot at which we’d stopped: it corresponded to number 6), was the address of the black market “Otto Bureau.” And suddenly the stench of rot blends in with the smells of the riding clubs and dead leaves inthe Bois. I also recall that sometimes on those afternoons, my brother, my father, and I would hop a random bus and ride it to the end of the line. Saint-Mandé. Porte de Gentilly …
    In October 1956, I became a boarder at the Montcel school in Jouy-en-Josas. I’ve attended all the schools in Jouy-en-Josas. The first nights in the dormitory were hard and I often felt like crying. But soon I devised a trick to bolster my courage: I focused my attention on a fixed point, a kind of talisman. In this case, a little black plastic horse.
    In February 1957, I lost my brother. One Sunday, my father and my Uncle Ralph came to collect me at the boarding school. On the road to Paris, my Uncle Ralph, who was driving, pulled the car over and stepped out, leaving me alone with my father. In the car, my father told me that my brother had died. I had spent the afternoon with him the previous Sunday, in our room on Quai de Conti. We had worked on our stamp collection. I had to return to school at five o’clock, and I’d explained that a theater troupewas going to put on a play for the students in the school’s small auditorium. I will never forget the look on his face, that Sunday.
    Apart from my brother, Rudy, his death, I don’t believe that anything I’ll relate here truly matters to me. I’m writing these pages the way one compiles a report or résumé, as documentation and to have done with a life that wasn’t my own. It’s just a simple film of deeds and facts. I have nothing to confess or elucidate and I have no interest in soul-searching or self-reflection. On the contrary, the more obscure and mysterious things remained, the more interesting I found them. I even looked for mystery where there was none. I lived through the events I’m recounting, up to the age of twenty-one, as if against a transparency—like in a cinematic process shot, when landscapes slide by in the background while the actors stand in place on a soundstage. I’d like to translate this impression, which many others have felt before me: everything paraded by like a transparency and I could not yet live my life.
    I was a boarder at the Montcel school until1960. Four years of military-style discipline. Every morning, flag salutes. Parade marches. Company, halt. Stand at attention. Evening inspections of the dormitories. Bullying by a few senior-year “captains” charged with maintaining “order.” Electric clamor of the morning alarm. Showers in batches of thirty. Fitness trail. At ease. At attention. And the hours spent gardening, when, in a row, we raked up the dead leaves.
    One of my classmates that year was named Safirstein. He was with me in the green dormitory. He told me that his father had been a medical student in Vienna when he was twenty. In 1938, at the time of the Anschluss, the Nazis had humiliated Vienna’s Jews by forcing them to wash the sidewalks and paint the Star of David on the windows of their shops themselves. His father had suffered this bullying for a time, then fled Austria. One night, we decided to go explore inside the blockhouse at