My life is a living hell. Everything is going wrong. Ophélie is always nagging me, she won’t give me a minute’s peace, she wants things to go back to the way they were, she wants me to be the man I was when we first met. I know now why women love soap operas, they tell the same stories over and over with the same dialogue, the same sets, actors who barely age a day in twenty years. The characters never change. Maybe this is their way of taking revenge on life. But I can understand Ophélie. Her whole world has been turned upside down, she’s living with a stranger, an intruder, an impostor, someone who is not interesting or exciting, some lunatic who is constantly brooding about horrors from a different age, a different world. This is not the man she married, this stranger has no business being in her life, in our soap-opera love story. I’ve tried to keep things to myself, but it’s getting harder and harder. I’ve tried hiding behind my work, I’ve made up emergencies, deals going south, I’ve blamed the recession the economists are always talking about, I’ve blamed tough negotiations, I’ve blamed the Chinese and the Indians and the Koreans for underbidding and stealing our market share, senior management for their obsession with endless meetings, the flurries of last-minute orders, the endless seminars and conferences, the unions terrified of losing their benefits just making things worse. I talk to her about these things the way you might explain a war film to a pacifist or a conscientious objector, I try to keep up the suspense by putting in just enough high-minded principles to justify the ruthlessness of our reactions. Our jobs are on the line, we’re fighting for our lives, for her. But she doesn’t care about any of this. In her eyes, none of these things can justify my silence, my constant absences, the bags under my eyes, my lack of interest in food, in sex, and nothing can justify my obsession with those books – those vile books, she calls them – about the war, the SS, the deportations, the extermination camps, the machinery of death, the post-war trials, the worldwide hunt for war criminals. In fact, she once threatened to throw them on the fire but one look at me and she knew it wouldn’t be a good move. I moved the books out to the garage and put a lock on the tool cabinet. Sometimes she said things that were really hurtful, though I knew it wasn’t really her, it was her mother talking. One day she said to me, ‘You’re all the same, you half-breeds, it’s all six of one and half a dozen of the other, you have no idea what you want really.’ I said, ‘You can tell your mother from me that six of one and half a dozen of the other are not the same thing, even though that’s what the expression is supposed to mean.’ Ophélie sulked for a whole week because I corrected her, and her mother phoned me and screamed that she wasn’t about to take French lessons from a foreigner. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I said, ‘It’s all relative. A foreigner is only foreign to a foreigner. In the absolute he is just a person and there’s no law that says he can’t read Molière and Maupassant.’ She slammed the phone down. One night, when I came home with a pile of new books under my arm, Ophélie with an ingenuousness that scared me said, ‘It’s not like we killed the Jews, I can’t see why you’re so obsessed with this whole thing.’ This was the last straw. I answered with the same chilly detachment. ‘You’re right, it wasn’t us, but it could have been us!’ I didn’t try to explain and she quickly changed the subject. ‘My mother’s coming over for dinner tonight, so do me a favour and snap out of this mood.’