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A dark and distant place

Philippe hopes that spending a week with his father who is moving to a senior residence following the suicide of his wife will help him patch up their difficult relationship, but mostly he wants to understand his mother’s fatal deed. She often reminisced about her charmed youth and never mentioned ending her life. Not buying his father’s claims of incomprehension over his wife’s suicide, Philippe goes back in time and investigates his parent’s past before he was born. He discovers a dark and violent world. He also tracks down a man who hurt his mother when she was young.

I often wonder what would have happened if I’d been scouting locations when the telephone rang and told my father to call a moving company instead. He was hardly the only old man in the world who had to sift through the relics of a lifetime. So many what ifs… all of them futile, I know, yet they haunt me every time I relive those events that – so harmless-seeming, at least to begin with – turned me into a murderer. Or perhaps even worse than a murderer, though I will never know that for sure. Not knowing is my choice.

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Do you remember me?

In wartime France, a young man was once forced to choose between selling his best friend to the Nazis, or saving his Jewish fiancée. Years later a telephone call reminds him that the past cannot be buried.

page 165:

“There are acts of heroism and there are acts of heroism,” I said, hearing despair in my own voice. “You do things that you pay for all your life, but you don’t regret them, because you know why you did them. The fact remains that it cost dearly and you keep paying and paying. Me, I bought on credit, if you will.”
“What did you buy?”
“Your life and your parents”

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