I miss Ophélie, even if she is the most difficult woman in the world. I want so much to be home, to go back to our boring suburban routine, anything for a quiet life. But she’s probably lying on the sofa over at her mother’s place right now, crying and ranting about me and about men in general, but especially Algerian and German men since we’re born stupid and cruel. I know how eloquent she can be on the subject, though not as eloquent as my mother-in-law. By now, the two of them will have flayed our relationship to the bone. God himself could not save us now. Ophélie and I don’t talk any more, she sits in her corner sulking and I sit in mine thinking. We’re past the stage where some grand gesture could bring us back together, more passionate than ever, and although we have both stopped digging, coldly, inexorably, the hole we are in just keeps getting bigger. The war is almost at an end, the silence of this phony ceasefire simply heralds the break-up. It’s probably for the best. I’ll never be a normal man, a dutiful husband, again. I’ve left her the bedroom and the living room, now I sleep in a corner of the mezzanine and I spend my evenings in the garage. I’ve set up our camping stuff and a bookcase out there. Everything is in that bookcase, all thirty volumes of it, the extermination of the world and the glacial silence that followed. I don’t know why I haven’t told Ophélie about this. Shame, maybe, and the fact that I don’t understand it myself, fear of the consequences. There is a difference between saying to yourself, ‘I am the son of a war criminal,’ and hearing someone else say, ‘You’re the son of a war criminal, a man guilty of genocide!’ Besides, we’ll only end up talking about me, about us, about our insignificant domestic problems, and I don’t want to talk about what we need to do to ‘sort things out’ when in my head I’m trying to sort out something that is beyond me, beyond us, something that will always be beyond us. Ophélie has always been pretty good at substituting one problem for another, with no regard for the nature or gravity of the original problem. She hops from subject to subject like a grasshopper and, in the end, everything always comes back to her. But right now I’m trying to come to terms with the Holocaust, something that would try the patience of God himself, and behind it all is the figure of my father.