TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Annie Ernaux

I feel as if I am about to slip it on, smooth it down over the kind of hooped and ruffled petticoat that gave dresses the bounce and fullness of a crinoline, like the woman’s skirt that Belmondo lifts in Breathless , and slide my feet into the matching linden-green pumps from Éram.) The photo has no depth. One has an impression of flat¬ness, as before a paintingwith no relief. The narrowness of the cubicle and lack of wide-angle lens made it impos¬sible to capture anything but the partition wall, the only sunny spot in the room. On the back of the photo, written in blue felt marker, is the inscription: Dormitory cubicle in Ernemont before leaving it, June 1959. I took the photo after sitting the written exam in philosophy. I had only recently acquired the camera, a Kodak Brownie Flash in Bakelite, given tomyparents byawholesaler. As shopkeepers, they received all manner of gifts when they bought in large quantities. I remember moving the table from under the window, where it usu¬ally stood, and pushing it against the bed, as it appears in the photo. I do not know what it meant to me to photograph the room. It is something I did not do again in the next forty years, or even think of doing. Perhaps I wanted to keep a record of a time of misfortune and metamorphosis, sym¬bolized, it seems to me now, by the two objects in the center of the photo: the dress I had worn most often the previous summer at the camp, and the table where I had spent so many hours toiling away at philosophy. I examine the photo with a magnifying glass, trying to uncover additional details. I gaze at the folds of the hanging dress, the 140