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because on Thursdays there was no school. In those days the children went to school all day Saturday but not on Thursday. That’s why we were playing in the street when Fernandel came to visit.
    As soon as his big black automobile with huge silver headlights stopped in front of the villa of La Comtesse, all the children would run to look at him, but never too close. Movie stars don’t like to be stared at. Exactly at one o’clock, every Thursday, Fernandel would step out of the car, his hat lowered over his eyes, the collar of his coat pulled up to his ears. He looked like a spy. And he would quickly go inside the villa. He would stay until his chauffeur came back to get him exactly at five. Every Thursday, without exception. This is true. All the people who lived on our street bragged that they had seen Fernandel in person.
    What did Fernandel do during these four hours in the house of this lady? Nobody knew, but the older boys would giggle and say that he came to play dominos with La Comtesse.
    In any case, it’s because people had seen Fernandel in person that they could say that my uncle Leon looked like him.
    One could have realized that by going to the movies to see the Fernandel films. They were always playing in the Montrouge cinema. But to see him in person was more real. I liked Fernandel’s movies, he always played the parts of a clumsy man, but I couldn’t go see them very often because I didn’t have money. Sometimes, like the other boys, I would sneak into the cinema without paying. Except that one day I got caught and kicked out. After that, I was too scared to try again. Especially because the man who caught me told me that the next time he catches me sneaking into the cinema he would call the police and tell my parents.
    I once asked my mother why Fernandel came to visit this lady? and my mother told me that maybe they were related. Maybe she’s his sister or a cousin. How can that be? I said. She’s so beautiful, and Fernandel is so ugly. That means nothing, my mother said. But my sister Sarah, who was listening to what I asked, started laughing, and said to me, you’re so stupid.
    It was true that Fernandel, without his actor make-up, was not very good-looking. Neither was my uncle Leon who had an ugly face with big vitreous green eyes, thick lips, and a loud voice. He yelled all the time. He would argue with everybody, especially with my father.
    Leon, like Fernandel in the movie when he played the priest Don Camillo, was always at war against the communists, and Leon hated my father because he was a communist. A Trotskyist.
    Somehow, I think my uncle Leon liked me, even though he mocked me all the time, and treated me like a slave. Maybe he thought of himself as a father to me, since my father was not at home very often. My father was an artist. A starving artist, beside being a Trotskyist.
    I’ll tell more about him later.
    Now I want to describe our apartment on the third floor, on the left side of the landing. It was just one room divided in two by a big heavy curtain. It’s my mother who had had the idea of the curtain. This way, on one side of the curtain was the dining room, and on the other a bedroom, but the whole room was not very large. My parents slept behind the curtain, and sometimes at night we could hear them breathing heavily.
    I slept on a little cot in a corner of what we called the dining room, the space on the side of the curtain where we did everything. I slept next to the window. During the night, if our green salamander-stove was lit, from my bed I would stare at its little mica windows, especially the two that were broken. They looked like the red eyes of a monster. I would watch the coal burning inside, and I invented all kinds of stories about wild fires, houses burning, and escape. I would see myself as a courageous firefighter. Many years later when I read William Blake and came across that beautiful line of his, Fire delights in