Volume 45, Number 1 · January 15, 1998
Thimble Theater
By Luc Sante
I'm always seeing my father among the gaggles of urchins who invariably garnish old pictures of Quai de la Batte or Ruelle Bodeux or the Trô Navai. It seems that every time a postcard photographer disposed his equipment in the working-class districts of Verviers, the factory town in southern Belgium in which both he and I were born, three or eight or twenty kids would materialize and stand in front of the lens, poking each other and making faces, and he would have the task of herding them into a picturesque grouping slightly to the side. Adults are infrequent, and in the bourgeois neighborhoods there are usually no visible humans at all.
Feature, 5082 words
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