My walks would lead me more often than not to the river, that quicksilver vein that curves across the city’s breast, with its twin islands—the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis—as its centerpieces. I liked to amble along, fossicking through the green bookstalls that have lined the Seine for centuries, manned by the bouquinistes, those riverside booksellers who tend doggedly to their modest treasures in sun and rain. If there was a glue that held together the sheafs of my existence during those months of the drôle de guerre, it was that cheap printer’s paste used in the manufacture of railway-station paperbacks, which dries and cracks prematurely, shedding the pages it binds as an animal sheds its winter fur. For when I was not walking the streets of the city, I read pulp novels bought several at a time from the bouquinistes. I raced through them in the evenings, lying on my bed in my little apartment, avoiding the propaganda on the radio and in the newspapers as much as I could. There was something consoling about these jigsaw-puzzle stories, steeped in melancholy, seesawing pleasantly between the familiar and the new, in which criminals and detectives faced off against one another in lurid intrigues of passion, revenge, and misanthropy. Each one was an expert inquiry into the byzantine machinations of the French police, the same machine I myself was so keen to avoid.

I was a fugitive at a time when there was an oversupply of fugitives. After the declaration of war, all Germans, even ex-Germans, had been required to hand themselves in to the police. We were dispatched to makeshift internment camps in the countryside. I’d spent most of the previous winter sleeping on a concrete floor in a school gymnasium in a desolate corner of Normandy, surrounded by Germans. All my adult life I’d suffered from night terrors, and so in the camp I slept during the day and stayed up at night, smoking and playing cards with the insomniacs, for fear of waking the entire dormitory with my screams. Finally, when it was clear there’d be no winter invasion, we were released. Now that the Wehrmacht had finally invaded, German expatriates were once again ordered to surrender themselves. But this time I was determined not to give myself up so easily.