It’s the miracle of that night. Our son, Samuel Noam, is a child of fear. Speechless at the idea of how we might deal with this miracle if we don’t stay together, we stay together. Marie-France sets only one condition. “If the child is born, don’t go off to war again. I don’t want him to be scared for you.”

I keep my promise.

I SPEND three and a half years reassuring Marie-France that I’m going to stay with her, even when she says she doesn’t want that. She wins a prize for her photo of Nelson’s cowrie necklace, and I get a part-time job at Le Monde. I don’t go to war again.

Samuel’s a delicate child. Marie-France often despairs when our little darling suddenly refuses to continue walking or begins to wail when he’s forced to enter an unfamiliar room. She never tires of getting up at night when the little chap is plagued by dreams, pointing at shadows and huddling in the farthest corner of his crib. She carries him, she consoles him, but she doesn’t know what I know about those dreams. I soon move into Samuel’s room. Marie-France is jealous and at the same time grateful that I find it so easy to care for our son. Her gratitude is sincere and tender, and we spend some wonderful times together. I never find Sam too hard to handle—not for one second. For ages he can’t talk properly and when he does speak, the nursery school teachers report that he says strange things. The speech therapist is also concerned. I’m the only one who doesn’t find the things he says weird. The words sound a bit like Tibetan or as if he learned words in his dreams that may well be logical descriptions of the things he sees during his nighttime adventures. It’s just that no one in the real world understands his language.

Marie-France sleeps with her boss. Her boss’s wife tells me this one day and even suggests we should have an affair—“To balance things out, mon cher.” However, I think of Sam and the fact that he already reacts quite violently to his mother’s efforts to keep her liaison secret from us—something that is both good and a cause of terrible worry for her. Yes, Sam can feel and empathize with his mother, and that might be another reason I don’t hold it against her, for my son learns to feel what I feel. When Marie-France treats him with indifference, he isn’t spiteful toward her but loving. He runs over to her on those chubby little legs and climbs onto her chair to stroke her cheek. I sometimes have the impression that he catches her moods as he might a cold.

I turn down Marie-France’s boss’s wife’s offer.