“Say, Dad, did Grandpa talk to you about his travels and about arriving in France?”

Dad put the manual down on his knees.

“He said very little about his journey, because he was obsessed with the idea of seeming more French than the French. He used to fill his face with French food like beef bourguignon and cassoulet, so as to forget the stuffed carp and red cabbage he used to eat in the East.”

“So he was a sort of survivor of great tragedies?”

“Yes, a survivor. That’s exactly right.”

“Like us, Dad, basically we’re sort of survivors too.”

He smiled, with his head on one side, and then he buried himself in his Krebs bible.

I fell into a doze, lulled by the random images that were still going through my head. I thought that thanks to Marie I was a survivor of the education system as well. I dreamt that I was on a big deserted ocean liner, walking on a vast, very well polished deck. Suddenly, I came face to face with a herd of cattle, just like that, who looked as though they were loose but in fact were surrounded by barbed wire. Then a siren went off and I found myself leaning over the rail looking at one of the cows that had been thrown into the still, calm sea, shining like molten lead. I searched for a lifebelt to throw to the cow, which was sinking fast, although it looked like it was being swallowed by sand or mud rather than water. Then I realized that the disappearing cow didn’t have any eyes, just two red holes.

I was drifting away in Dad’s arms as he carried me up to my bedroom and I didn’t want to wake up properly. But I still had time to think that it would soon be my birthday and that life might not be so bad, after all.

7

My stunt in the playground had given me a certain status at school. It’s not every day you see a person defending his honour by taking a chunk out of someone’s ear. Luckily, it wasn’t too serious – just a matter of sewing the bully’s dangling earlobe back on. Since his ear had to be protected for the next two weeks with a big bandage, I took to calling him Van Gogh. Even the teachers seemed to be taking me more seriously and seeing me in a different way: perhaps from slightly less high up and more on the same plane.