Everyone was silent, half listening to the dull, distant gunfire that echoed from the suburbs, day and night, though no one paid any attention to it any more.

Karol had pulled Hélène on to his knee. She had been there for a while, and he had forgotten she was there; he stroked her absent-mindedly, the way you play with a dog’s ears. And sometimes, while he was talking, he pulled her hair so hard that Hélène trembled in pain; he was rough in his affection, but Hélène bore it without complaining, happy to be able to irritate her mother. Nevertheless, she wanted to get down from his lap; he held her back.

‘Wait a while. You never sit with me.’

‘I have lessons to prepare, Papa,’ she said, kissing his tanned hand and its long, slender fingers; he wore an old-fashioned, wide, round wedding ring, the symbol of slavery.

‘Learn your lessons here then.’

‘All right, Papa.’

He slipped a small sugar cube dipped in cognac into her mouth. ‘This is for you, Hélène.’ Then immediately forgot about her again.

They talked about Shanghai, Tehran, Constantinople. They had to leave. But where should they go? Danger was everywhere, but since everyone was in the same boat it seemed less urgent; it would pass. Hélène wasn’t listening; she was completely indifferent to the name of some distant corner of the world where she would end up. She had got down from his lap and was sitting in the red armchair now, learning her lesson for the next day. It was from a book on ‘German Conversation’ and she had to memorise ‘die zwanzigste Lektion’, the description of a close-knit family. Hélène repeated the words quietly: ‘Eine glückliche Familie (a happy family). Der Vater (the father) ist ein frommer Mann (is a pious man) …

‘Good Lord!’ she thought. ‘What imbeciles …’

She looked at the illustration that accompanied the text.

The ‘happy family’ all sat together in a blue sitting room; the father, who had a blond curly beard that came down to his chest, wore a frock coat and slippers, and was reading the newspapers beside the fireplace; the mother, the Hausfrau, was dusting the bookcase shelves, wearing a long apron tied at the waist; the young girl was playing the piano while the schoolboy learned his lessons by the light of a lamp; two young children, a yellow dog and a grey cat sat on the rug in the middle of the room, all ‘playing’, according to the text, ‘the innocent games appropriate to their age’.

‘What a fantasy!’ thought Hélène.

She looked at the people around her. They didn’t even see she was there, but to her as well they were unreal, distant, half-hidden in a mist: vain, insubstantial ghosts lacking flesh and blood; she lived on the sidelines, far away from them, in an imaginary world where she was mistress and queen. She picked up the small pencil that she always kept in her pocket, hesitated, then gradually, very gradually, pulled the book close to her, as if it were a loaded weapon.

She started to write:

The father is thinking about a woman he met in the street, and the mother has only just said goodbye to her lover. They do not understand their children, and their children do not love them; the young girl is thinking about the boy she’s in love with, and the boy about the naughty words he has learned at school. The little children will grow up and be just like them. Books lie. There is no virtue, no love in the world. Every household is the same. In every family there is nothing but greed, lies and mutual misunderstanding.

She stopped, twiddled the pencil round in her hand and a cruel, shy smile spread across her face. It made her feel better to write these things down. No one paid any attention to her or cared about her. She could amuse herself in any way she pleased; she continued writing, barely pressing down on the pencil, but with a strange rapidity and dexterity she had never experienced before, an agility of thought that made her aware of what she was writing and what was taking shape in her mind simultaneously, so they suddenly coincided. She experimented with this new game, as if she were watching tears flow down her face on to her hands on a winter’s evening and seeing how the frost transformed them into icy flowers.

It’s the same everywhere. In our house as well, it’s the same. The husband, the wife and …

She hesitated, then wrote: ‘The lover …’

She rubbed out the last word, then wrote it in again, enthralled as it appeared before her eyes, then disguised it once more by adding little arrows and curlicues to each letter until the word disappeared and looked like a small insect with a mass of antennae, or a plant with many thorns. It had an evil air about it, strange, secretive and crude, that pleased her.

‘What are you writing, Hélène?’

She gave an involuntary start, and they all stared at her with surprise and suspicion as her face slowly turned white, looking old before its time and suddenly exhausted.

‘Now, then … What are you writing? Give it to me,’ Bella commanded.

Hélène clenched her hands together and silently began twisting and tearing up the paper.

Bella pounced. ‘I said give it to me!’

Desperately, Hélène tried to crumple the paper between her trembling fingers but it was too thick; the coloured illustration on the glossy paper creased but wouldn’t tear; terrified, she breathed in the smell of glue and heavy coloured ink that she would never forget …

‘You’re mad! You will give that to me at once! Be careful, Hélène!’ shouted Bella in a rage and, grabbing her daughter’s shoulder, she dug her nails into her with such fury that Hélène could feel their sharp tips pierce her flesh through her dress.