For my part, I felt a... «Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History»

For my part, I felt a mixture of pride and embarrassment: pride because I would soon start school, and embarrassment because I was still unable to pronounce collectivization. I had kept trying since we’d left the Central Party Committee building, and I’d kept on getting it wrong. When Mihal asked me to sing a song in French, instead of complying, as everybody expected, I declared how much I hated the language. I had hated it, I said, from the first day I was in the crèche, when the other nursery children insisted that I was not like them because I spoke only French. My fear now was that the same thing would happen when I started school, that I would not be able to make new friends because I spoke French. Besides, I did not understand why we had to speak a language nobody else understood, the language of a country we had never visited, and where nobody we knew lived.