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its form, I remembered the fire inside our little pot-stove that looked like a puffy green frog.
    My two sisters slept together in the kitchen on a folding cot. Un litcage. During the day it was folded with the mattress inside and pushed against a wall of the kitchen. At night, when that bed was opened, it blocked the entrance to the kitchen. Our kitchen was more like a narrow corridor than a room. It was not practical, because when my father or me had to go piss in the sink, we had to step on my sisters’ bed, and they would complain, and scream, especially Sarah, the older one.
    You’re disgusting, the two of you, she would say. You have no manners. It stinks. Can’t you go downstairs to the cabinet to do your dirty things?
    There was no toilet in our apartment. The W.C. was downstairs in the courtyard.
    In Leon and Marie’s apartment, there was a place to go faire caca et pipi. They had a toilet installed with the bathtub. They had it installed inside one of their closets, which was quite something, because before the war, the period I am telling about, only rich people had toilets in their apartments.
    But for us, my father and me, it was either the kitchen sink or the chamber pot.
    Of course we had a chamber pot since my sisters and my mother couldn’t use the sink. But for my father and me the chamber pot was not practical because if we peed standing up it would splash all over. So we had to crouch over the chamber pot the way my sisters and my mother did.
    We also had a pail. Un seau hygiènique. And every morning it was my job to go empty it in the W.C. in the courtyard. Oh, did I hate doing that.
    This pail was a big part of my childhood. I complained every morning when I had to carry that filthy pail downstairs to empty it. I moaned and groaned and cursed saying, It’s always me who has to do this dirty work, why can’t Sarah carry the pail downstairs, she’s older and stronger than me, why can’t she empty the pail? That’s what I would whine every morning when my father shouted at me because I hadn’t yet emptied the pail. Why can’t Sarah do it sometimes. And it’s true that my sister Sarah was stronger than me. She would kick me and punch me when we fought, and she always won. How come it’s always me who has to empty that stupid pail? But my father would say that it wasn’t a job for a girl, and when I kept on whining he just slapped me across the face and shouted, Get the hell out of here you lazy bum! So every morning I went down the three flights of stairs with my stinking pail.
    My father was not mean, but when I did something stupid, or when I didn’t do what I was supposed to do, he wouldn’t hesitate to swat me.
    Ah, my father, did he have a rough life. Maybe that’s why he yelled all the time. I think he failed in everything, as a father, a husband, an artist, a man. He always argued with my mother, but especially with Leon. I don’t know if Leon and Marie made my parents pay rent for our one room apartment upstairs, but most of the disputes had to do with money.
    I’ll have to tell more about my father and the rest of the family, but now I want to finish the story of our slop-pail.
    As I said, every morning I went down the three flights of stairs with that filthy pail and emptied it in the toilet at the far end of the courtyard. It was heavy because during the night everybody had used it. I had to be careful not to splash myself when I emptied it into the hole in the ground in the cabinet. The toilet had no seat. It was just a hole in the ground with a place marked for your feet. Today in Paris there are still cafes with toilets like this where you have to crouch to do your thing. It’s disgusting. You splash all over your legs. That’s why I had to be careful when I emptied my pail, otherwise I ended up with shit all over my shoes and legs. After that I had to rinse the pail under a small brass faucet outside on