I let that pass and became absorbed in the contemplation of murderers frozen in the act of murder standing over their victims frozen in their deaths. Sitting in her hospital bed, a little five-year-old Peruvian was cradling a newborn baby in her arms; Goering was lying in agony on a stretcher, and bodies dressed in German uniforms were swinging from gallows. Behind a barbed wire fence, wax corpses were piled one on top of the other in a huge charnel heap. I looked at them, stupefied. There were Buchenwald and Dachau withdrawing into the murky depths of history, as distant as the Christians being thrown to the lions in the Musee Grevin. When I found myself outside again in the sun's dazzling light, the whole of Europe had vanished somewhere in the outer limits of space. I looked at the women with their bare shoulders, at the men in their bright spores shirts, biting into hot dogs or licking ice-cream cones. No one spoke my language, and I myself had forgotten it. I had lost all my memories, even the memory of my own face: there was no mirror in Lewis's house which I could look into at eye-level, and I had to apply my make-up gropingly in a little hand mirror. I hardly remembered who I was, and I wondered if Paris still existed.