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moral lessons too, usually early on Sunday mornings before reciting Mass. I like the moral lessons because Mam always tells us a story, always a different one, set in places we’re familiar with. Afterwards she asks Laure and me questions. They aren’t difficult questions, but she just asks them, looking straight at us, and I can feel the very gentle blue of her gaze penetrating deep inside me.
    â€˜The story takes place in a convent where there were a dozen residents, twelve little orphans just like I was when I was your age. One evening at dinner time, guess what they saw on the table? A large platter of sardines, which they were very fond of – they were poor, you see, and for them having sardines for dinner was a feast! And in that platter there were precisely as many sardines as there were little orphan girls, twelve sardines. No, no, there was an extra one – there were thirteen sardines in all. When everyone had eaten, the sister pointed to the last sardine that remained in the middle of the platter and asked, “Who will eat the last one? Does anyone among you want it?” Not a hand was raised, not one of the little girls answered. “Well then,” said the sister gaily, “here’s what we’ll do: we’ll blow out the candle and when the room is dark, whoever wants the sardine can eat it without being ashamed.” The sister put out the candle, and do you know what happened then? Each of the little girls reached out her hand in the dark to take the sardine, and her hand found another little girl’s hand. There were twelve little hands in the platter!’
    Those are the stories Mam tells, I’ve never heard better or funnier ones.
    But what I really like a lot is Bible History. It’s a big book bound in dark-red leather, an old book with a cover embossed with a golden sun and twelve rays emanating from it. Sometimes, Mam lets Laure and I look at it.
    We turn the pages very slowly to look at the illustrations, to read the words written at the top of the pages, the captions. There are engravings that I love more than anything else, like the Tower of Babel or the one that says: ‘The prophet Jonah remained three days in the belly of the whale and came out alive.’ Off in the distance, near the horizon, there is a large sailing vessel melting in with the clouds, and when I ask Mam who is in the vessel she can’t answer me. I have the feeling that one day I’ll know who was travelling in that large ship and saw Jonah when he came out of the whale’s belly. I also like it when God makes ‘armies in the air’ appear amid the clouds over Jerusalem. And the battle of Eleazar against Antiochus, where we see an enraged elephant bursting into a group of warriors. What Laure likes best is the beginning, the creation of man and woman and the picture where we see the devil in the form of a serpent with a man’s head coiled around the tree of good and evil. That’s how she knew it was the chalta tree that is at the edge of our garden, because it has the same leaves and fruit. Laure loves to go out to the tree in the evening, she climbs up on the main branches and picks the thick-skinned fruit that we’ve been forbidden to eat. She doesn’t talk about that to anyone but me.
    Mam reads us stories from the Holy Scripture, the Tower of Babel, the city with the tower reaching all the way up to the sky. Abraham’s sacrifice, or else the story of Joseph being sold by his brothers. It took place in 2876 BC , twelve years before the death of Isaac. I remember that date well. I also really like the story of Moses saved from the waters, Laure and I often ask Mam to read it to us. To prevent the Pharaoh’s soldiers from killing her child, his mother put him in a ‘little cradle of woven reeds’, the book says, ‘and she placed him in the water near the bank of the Nile’. The Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the river