TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Annie Ernaux

But I know that the girl who stands weeping at the edge of the river Orne, devouring a creamcake, is proud of what she has been through, and considers the indignities and insults negligible. She is edified by the pride of experience, the possession of new knowledge whose effect on her in the months ahead she cannot yet assess or imagine. One cannot see the future of something learned.

She did not meet her peers, and she is the one who is no longer the same.

This time—April 28, 2015—I am leaving the camp for good. Until I had returned there, through writing, and remained for months and months, I had not really left. I had not yet risen from the bed where I lay naked and shiv¬ering, summarily gagged by the sex of a man for whom, by the next day, I had sworn mad, undying love, leading me towrite in 2001: “There is absolute continuity between the room in S and the abortionist’s room on rue Cardinet. I move from one room to the other, and what lies between is erased.” It seems to me that I have finally freed the girl of ’58, broken the spell that kept her prisoner for over fifty years in that majestic old building on the river Orne, bursting at the seams with children chanting, “We are the band of summer’s children!”

I can say: she is me and I am her.

Impossible to stop here. I cannot stop until I’ve reached a certain point in the past, which right now is the future of my story. I need to reach the time beyond the two years following the camp at S. 138