All the time I was there, I didn’t open a math or a physics book once. To shake off my fears, to escape the present, I did what I had always done: I read novels. That’s the only thing I remembered about those two weeks, the books I read. That winter, I suffered with the twins in Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook as they struggled to survive the inhumanity of man in a city ravaged by war. I wandered the Creole neighborhood of Fort-de-France in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, crossed the Amazon rain forest in Luis Sepúlveda’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, and was surrounded by tanks during the Prague Spring as I contemplated The Unbearable Lightness of Being. These novels did not heal me, but they briefly relieved me of the burden of being myself. They were like a decompression chamber. Like a dike raised against the waves of terror crashing over me.

On those days when the sun never rose, I woke each morning thinking it would be my last day of freedom. Whenever I heard a car approaching, I was convinced the police had come to arrest me. The one time the doorbell rang, determined not to go to prison, I climbed onto the roof so that, if necessary, I could throw myself off.

4.

But no one came to arrest me. Not in the Landes, not on the Côte d’Azur.

In January, when I went back to the Lycée Saint-Exupéry, life returned to normal. Almost. Although everyone was talking about Alexis Clément, people were not lamenting his death but droning on about the rumors that Vinca and the philosophy teacher had been having a secret affair and had run away together. As with most salacious stories, this one enthralled the academic community. Everyone had something to add—an opinion, a little secret, an anecdote. They reveled in the scandal. Even some of the teachers whose open-mindedness I had always admired got involved, vying with one another to come up with the wittiest comments and making me physically sick. A handful remained dignified, including Jean-Christophe Graff, my French teacher, and Miss DeVille, who taught English literature. Although I was not in her class, I heard her in my mother’s office saying, “We should not lower ourselves to wallow in mediocrity. It is an infectious disease.”

I took comfort in that sentence, and for a long time it became my touchstone when I had a difficult decision to make.