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.
