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the far end of the park. This meant crossing the great lawn, and if one of the staff spotted us we could be severely punished. Safirstein had refused to join in this scoutingexpedition. The next day, my classmates ostracized him and called him a “chicken,” with that garrison-style boorishness that emerges when “the men” are among themselves. Safirstein’s father showed up unannounced at the college one afternoon. He wanted to talk to the entire dorm. He asked us nicely not to bully his son and to stop calling him “chicken.” This way of handling things amazed my classmates, Safirstein included. We were all sitting around the table in the teachers’ lounge. Safirstein was next to his father. Everyone made up in good spirits. I think his father gave us cigarettes. None of my schoolmates gave the incident any further thought. Not even Safirstein. But I had keenly felt the anxiousness of that man, who wondered if the nightmare he had suffered twenty years earlier wasn’t starting up again for his son.
    The Montcel school catered to the unloved, bastards, lost children. I remember a Brazilian who for a long while occupied the bed next to mine, who’d had no news of his parents for two years, as if they had left him in the checkroom ofa forgotten station. Others were already smuggling blue jeans and sneaking past police roadblocks. Two of the students, two brothers, would even stand trial some twenty years later. Gilded youth, for the most part, but the gilding was tarnished, of poor alloy. Most of those fine young lads would have no future.
    My readings at the time. Some books left their mark:
Fermina Márquez, The Penal Colony, Les Amours jaunes, The Sun Also Rises.
In other books, I rediscovered the fantastic character of the streets:
Marguerite de la nuit
by Pierre Mac Orlan,
Rien qu’une femme
by Francis Carco,
La Rue sans nom
by Marcel Aymé. In the college infirmaries, there were still some old novels lying around that had survived the last two wars, and that stood quietly on the shelves for fear someone might haul them down to the basement. I remember reading Bazin’s
The Children of Alsace.
But mainly, I read the first “Livres de Poche” that had just been published, with their purple cardboard bindings. Good novels and bad, indiscriminately. Many have since gone out of print.Among those books, several titles have retained their aroma:
La Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche, La Rose de Bratislava, Marion des neiges.
    On Sundays, strolls with my father and one of his cronies of the time, Stioppa. My father saw a lot of him. He wore a monocle and his hair was so thick with pomade that it left a stain when he rested his head against the sofa. He had no discernible profession. He lived in a boardinghouse on Avenue Victor-Hugo. Sometimes Stioppa, my father, and I would go walking in the Bois de Boulogne.
    On another Sunday, my father took me to the boat show at the Quai Branly. We met a friend of his from before the war, “Paulo” Guerin. An aged young man wearing a blazer. I don’t remember whether he was also visiting the show or manning a booth there. My father explained that Paulo Guerin never did anything but ride horses, drive around in fancy cars, and seduce the ladies. Let that be a lesson to me: yes, indeed, in life, you have to have your diplomas. That late afternoon, my father seemed pensive,as if he’d just met a ghost. Each time I’ve found myself on the Quai Branly, I’ve thought of this Paulo Guerin and his slightly stocky build, his pasty-looking face under swept-back brown hair. And the question remained forever unanswered: whatever could he have been doing at the boat show that Sunday, without his diplomas?
    There was also a certain Charly d’Alton. It was especially with him and his old pal Lucien P. that my father tossed the phone back and forth like a rugby ball. His name reminded me of the Dalton Brothers in the comic books,