TE20 Migrant Mosaics

A Girl’s Story

girl who was me, Annie D, to the pavement in front of the train station of S, in the Orne. All this time, I’ve remained within the confines of the camp, for¬bidding myself to step outside the limits of the summer of ’58, either forward or backward in time, forcing myself to remain there, immersed, without a future. As a result, I have progressed very slowly, spinning out those six weeks at camp over some forty other weeks, 273 days to be exact, in order to examine them as closely as possible and make them truly live through writing, that is, to make one feel the immense depth and breadth of a summer of youth in the two hours it takes to read one hundred pages. Often, I am seized by the thought that I could die at the end of my book. I do not know what this means, whether it is a fear of publication or a sense of completion. I do not envy those who write and never think they could die once the book is finished. Before leaving S, I pause on the last image, after the children have boarded the buses for the train station, and the silence of the first day abruptly returns, descending upon the space within the castle walls, and she walks to the center of the city to see everything again. She stands alone by the old washhouse, her eyes fixed upon the long façade of the sanatorium in the glow of the five o’clock sun on the other side of the river. She looks at the place where she is sure she has never been happier, not since the day she was born. Where she discovered parties, freedom, male bodies. She would like not to have to go. But everyone has left, or is in the midst of leaving, anxious to be home again. (I may have been the only one who wanted this life to last forever.) It is by no means certain, at this moment, that the hope of finding H in Rouen can make up for the emptiness she feels now. How could one live apart from the companions of summer for a whole year? 137