Le toit

As a child, my grandfather used to climb up onto this roof to observe the movements of the enemy that had decimated my family. Later, my father spent hours up there, watching for the return of my grandfather who had been taken prisoner in combat.
Then my turn came. At first, I went up just to kill time. It is where I began to smoke cigarettes and read forbidden books without ever understanding what the danger was all about. The only real danger I ever encountered was the black smoke that came down in sheets from the chimney every time my father, inside the house, struggled over the fire. His father had disappeared before ever teaching him how to light one correctly.
One day, I was unable to stop a pack of soot from completely blackening the pages of my book. But when I lifted my thumbs, the print underneath them was still legible. Then I realized that on every page, a small part of the story had escaped me. I had to discover these little pieces of text that I had unknowingly kept hidden from myself and began the book over from the beginning, page by page, letting my thumbs fall instinctively and then lifting them to read what was underneath. But the words my thumbs had obscured made no sense. The thought of all that was being hidden from me was dizzying. Who could have helped me? Not my father, he did not even know how to light a fire. I began to scour the horizon in hopes that someone was coming to explain, my grandfather or even the enemy, I was ready to make a pact with the enemy! Suddenly, realizing how far off track my thoughts had taken me, how dangerous my book had become, I threw it down the chimney. Shortly afterwards, I heard my father shouting. It was the first time he had ever got the fire to really take.