The notary didn’t answer and then we were in the garden.
Farther on, in back, partly hidden by two copper beeches, I made out a kind of bungalow. As we went closer, I discovered it was built on stilts, and that its roof was composed of layered, upturned tiles. A large man with white hair was standing on the porch and waving at us. He came down the wooden steps and approached us with a supple gait. He wore a well-groomed chin beard that he kept stroking, and had big blue eyes.
“Monsieur Abott,” the notary said, indicating the man.
“François Aubert and nephew,” Uncle Alex said in a worldly voice.
“Pleased to meet you. If you’d care to come up . . .”
I glanced at Uncle Alex. He was very pale.
We walked up the steps to the porch. Abott and the notary went ahead.
“I thought . . . it was an old mill,” my uncle said timidly.
“I knocked down the old mill five years ago and put this up instead,” Abott stated. “It’s much nicer. No comparison.”
We remained motionless on the porch, my uncle and I, facing the other two. Abott grazed his chin beard with a cautious index finger. I don’t know why, but I’ve never trusted men with overly groomed chin beards.
“It has much more character than the old mill, believe me,” said the notary.
“Are you sure about that?” asked my uncle. He had grown even paler, and I was afraid he was going to faint.
“My friend Abott spent many years in Indochina,” the notary said. “He’s only been back since 1954, and he built this house so as not to feel too homesick. Personally, I find it has a ton of character . . . You were looking for something unusual, weren’t you?”
“Not exactly,” my uncle said.
Abott and the notary dragged us inside, into a long, narrow space, no doubt the living room.
“You will notice,” the notary began sententiously, “that all the walls and partitions are made of genuine teak.”
“All of them,” Abott repeated. “Every one.”
A stone bust of Buddha occupied a large niche facing us. On the walls were damaged paintings on silk, which seemed to bear traces of soot. Rocking chairs were arranged around a very low Chinese table with heavy corkscrew legs.
“What do you think?” I whispered to Uncle Alex.
He didn’t hear. Looking grief-stricken, he pressed his lips together like someone about to cry in frustration.
“So?” asked Abott.
Uncle Alex kept silent. He crossed the room like an automaton, hunched over. He was having trouble forging a path amid all the Far Eastern knickknacks arranged in total disorder, the opium trays and rosewood screens. He stopped in front of a lacquer panel.
“That,” said Abott, “is not just some piece of junk, I’ll have you know. It’s from the eighteenth century. It depicts the arrival of Louis XV’s ambassadors at the Thai court in 1726.”
“Are you selling that with the rest, Michel?” asked the notary.
“Depends on the price.”
“I’m going to show the gentleman the other rooms.”
“No,” whispered my Uncle Alex. “There’s no need . . .”
“But of course there is! Why not?” the notary exclaimed.
“No. No. Please . . .”
I lowered my eyes, expecting an outburst. I stared at the tips of my shoes and, a bit farther away, at a leopard skin of impressive dimensions splayed over the floor.
“Are you feeling all right?” asked Abott.
“It’s nothing . . . I just need some air,” Uncle Alex murmured.
We followed him out to the porch.
“Take a seat,” said Abott, pointing to some rattan chairs.
Uncle Alex collapsed onto one of them. The notary and I sat down across from him.
“I’ll fetch us some cool drinks,” Abott said. “Please excuse me a moment . . .”
He disappeared into the living room. I caught his gesture of complicity for the notary, which seemed to say, Try to convince him—but perhaps I had a suspicious mind.
Regardless, that man with the well-groomed chin beard had seemed dubious from the outset. I could easily imagine him involved in some kind of currency smuggling.
“This is not at all what I expected,” my uncle said in a moribund voice.
“Oh, no?”
“I thought it was a real mill, you understand . . .”
“This is just as good as a real mill, don’t you think?” said the notary.
“It depends on your point of view . . . I want something restful, you understand . . .”
“But the Yangtse Mill is utterly restful,” said the notary. “You’ll feel like you’re far from everything, thousands of miles away. Like being in a foreign country.”
“I’m not looking for a foreign country,” Uncle Alex replied gravely. “Besides, foreign from where?”
He suddenly fell silent, exhausted by that declaration.
“You should reconsider,” said the notary. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity . . . Abott has some pressing obligations . . . He’d let you have it for a song . . . You ought to leap on the chance.”
We remained silent. I tapped on a curious wooden table, small and circular.
“Do you know what that’s called?” said the notary, nodding at the table.
“No.”
“The Thai call it a rain drum.”
Uncle Alex remained prostrate. A deluge began to fall, a tropical downpour, a monsoon.
“Speaking of rain,” the notary said jokingly.
From the other end of the porch, a young Annamite, looking like a domestic in his white jacket, came toward us carrying a tray. The rain redoubled in violence and the air felt very heavy. Uncle Alex mopped his brow. Abott reappeared, wearing a half-open khaki shirt. He stroked his beard.
“Here, I’ve brought you some quinine. Better safe than sorry,” he said to Uncle Alex.
The domestic set the tray of refreshments down on the floor and Abott gave him an order, using the language of over there. The other lit a Chinese lantern that swung above our heads. At that moment, all the sadness and disappointment I had sensed in my uncle flooded over me as well. Throughout our trip, he had been dreaming of an old stone mill, with a river running through the grass, in the French countryside. We had driven through the Oise, the Orne, the Eure, and other regions. Finally, we had arrived in this village. But, Uncle, what good had all these efforts done us?
XII
Foucré was murmuring to someone near the window. A young blonde was sitting on the sofa, the only furnishing in the room. She was smoking. When I entered, Foucré turned. He came toward me, indicating the young woman:
“Let me introduce you to Denise Dressel.”
I shook her hand and she gave me a distracted glance. Foucré had resumed his confabulation. I sat at the foot of the sofa while she ignored me.
I repeated to myself the name he had just spoken, Dressel, and immediately a first name appended itself to it in my mind: Harry. But who was Harry Dressel? I labored to put a face to those four syllables, whose combination seemed self-evident. I closed my eyes, the better to concentrate. Had someone once spoken to me of a certain Harry Dressel? Had I read that name somewhere? Had I met the man in some previous life? I heard myself asking in a toneless voice:
“Are you the daughter of Harry Dressel?”
She stared at me, then made a sudden movement and dropped her cigarette.
“How did you know?”
I searched for an answer. In vain. The question had occurred spontaneously and I would have liked to tell her so, but such a change had come over her face that I remained mute.
“Do you know Harry Dressel?”
She had said “Harry Dressel” almost in a whisper, as if the name burned her lips.
“A little, yes.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I’ve heard a lot about him,” I said, watching for any indication that would clue me in as to who this Harry
Dressel actually was.
“People have talked to you about my father?” she asked anxiously.
“Lots of people.”
“Why? Are you in show business?”
I saw a circus ring, heard the endless drumroll, while, far above, a trapeze artist is about to perform the salto mortale and, my eyes glued to the tips of my shoes, I pray for her safety.
“He was a great artist,” I said.
She looked at me with gratitude. She had even taken my hand.
“Do you think people still remember him?”
“Of course.”
“He would be so happy to hear that,” she said.
I walked her home that evening. She wanted to show me a picture of her father, the only photo she had of him. As we walked, I stole glances at her. How old was she? Twenty-three. And I, barely seventeen. She was of average height, blonde, with pale, slanted eyes, a small nose, and carmine lips. Her cheekbones, bangs, and white fox-fur coat made her look Mongolian.
She lived in a cluster of buildings on Avenue Malakoff. We went through the vestibule and into her room. It was very spacious. Two French windows, a chandelier. The bed, wider than I’d ever seen, was covered with a leopard-skin throw. At the other end of the room, near one of the windows, a vanity in sky-blue satin. And side by side, on the back wall, two large photos in identical gilded frames. She immediately went to take them down and lay them on the bed.
The two faces had been captured in three-quarter view, heads slightly tilted. Underneath the photo of the man was his name in white letters: HARRY DRESSEL.
He seemed to be no more than thirty, with wavy blond hair, bright eyes, and a smile. He was wearing an open-throated shirt over a casually knotted polka-dot neckerchief. Between his portrait and his daughter’s was probably a distance of more than twenty years, making father and daughter look more like brother and sister. It moved me to think that she had insisted on being photographed in the same pose and in the same lighting as her father.
“I look just like him, don’t I? I’m every inch a Dressel.”
She said “a Dressel” the way she might have said “a Hapsburg.”
“If I’d wanted, I could have been in show business, too, but he wouldn’t have liked that. And he would have been a hard act to follow.”
“I’ll bet he was a good father,” I said.
She stared at me in surprise and delight. Finally, she had met somebody who understood that she was not the daughter of just anyone, but of Harry Dressel. Later, when I moved in with her, I foresaw that I’d play an important part in her life. I was the first person with whom she’d been able to talk about her father. And for her, that was the only topic of interest. I told her that her father fascinated me and that, since meeting him, I couldn’t stop wondering about the man. I confided that I planned to write a biography of Harry Dressel. I would have done anything for her.
She hadn’t seen him since 1951, back when she was still a child, for that was the year he’d been offered a job in Egypt, as emcee in a cabaret right near the Auberge des Pyramides. And then, in January 1952, the Cairo fire had, alas, coincided with the disappearance of Harry Dressel. He’d been living at the time in a hotel that burned to the ground. At least, that’s what they’d said, but she didn’t believe it.
She was convinced that her father was still alive, that he was hiding out for reasons of his own, but that someday he would resurface. I swore to her that I believed so too. Strange girl. She spent most of the afternoon stretched out on the large bed, in a bright red bathrobe, smoking cigarettes with an opiate aroma. And she always listened to the same records, which she asked me to put on ten or twenty times in a row. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and a 78 whose grooves contained the overture of an operetta called Deux sous de fleurs.
At first, I couldn’t fathom why she had so much money. I had seen her buy, on the same afternoon, a panther coat and several pieces of jewelry. She kindly offered to have suits made for me by a tailor whose clientele had included the dukes of Spoleto and Aosta, but I hadn’t dared cross the threshold of that temple. I finally confessed that I wasn’t very interested in clothes, and as she insisted on knowing what did “interest me,” I said books. And to this day, I’ve kept the ones she was nice enough to give me: the six-volume Larousse encyclopedia; the complete Littré dictionary; Buffon’s Natural History, in a very old, very handsomely illustrated deluxe edition; and finally, the Memoirs of Prince von Bülow, bound in pale green morocco leather. I was hurt when she explained to me, after a time, that she was being “kept” by an Argentinian who came to France every May to watch the polo championships in which his nephew competed. Yes, I was jealous of that Sr. Roberto Lorraine, whose photo she showed me: a short, pudgy man with gleaming black hair.
As for me, I was ready to start the book that would trace the life of her father, with all the passion I could muster. She was impatient to see me write the first pages. She wanted the setting to be worthy of such an enterprise, and thought long and hard about the table on which I would compose my opus.
She finally opted for an Empire desk overloaded with bronze fixtures. The chair on which I’d sit had arms covered in deep red velvet bordered by gold tacks, and a tall, solid back. Finally, I had to tell her it was hard for me to stay seated very long and she acquired a cathedral lectern that cost her a fortune. At such moments, I felt she loved me.
And there I was, that first evening, seated at my desk. On it were pencils she had sharpened. Two or three of those huge American-made fountain pens with full bladders. And bottles of ink in every hue. And erasers. And pink and green blotters. And a pad of letter-size writing paper open to a blank page. I wrote in block capitals: THE LIFE OF HARRY DRESSEL, and in the upper right-hand corner of the following page, the number 1. I had to start at the beginning, ask her what memories she had kept of her father, everything she knew about his childhood and youth.
Harry Dressel was born in Amsterdam. He had lost his parents at a very young age and left Holland for Paris. She couldn’t say how he occupied his time until he reappeared in 1937, on the stage of the Casino de Paris, as one of Mistinguett’s chorus boys.
The following year, he was hired by the Bagdad on Rue Paul-Cézanne to do a little variety number. The war caught him there. Afterward, he became, not exactly a star, but a top attraction. First at the Vol de Nuit until 1943. Then at the Cinq à Neuf until 1951, the date of his departure for Egypt, where he vanished. That, in broad strokes, was his professional career.
Denise’s mother was one of those riders at the Bal Tabarin who sat astride the wooden horses of the carousel. The carousel turned and turned, ever more slowly, the horses reared, and the riders arched backward, breasts bare and hair loose. The orchestra played Weber’s Invitation to the Dance. Dressel had lived with that girl for three years before she absconded to America. After that, he had raised Denise on his own.
One Sunday afternoon, she took me to the 18th arrondissement, to Square Carpeaux, where she and her father had lived. The windows of their small ground-floor apartment looked out on the park, so he could keep an eye on her while she played in the sandbox. That Sunday, the windows to the apartment were open. We heard people talking, but didn’t dare peer inside. The sandbox hadn’t changed a bit, she told me. And she relived the color and dusty aroma of the late Sunday afternoons she had experienced there. One Thursday, for her birthday, her father had taken her to a restaurant. She hadn’t forgotten the route. You follow Rue Caulaincourt, beneath the acacias. The Montmartre of our childhood. A restaurant on the left, on the corner of Rue Francoeur. It was there. For dessert, she had had strawberry-pistachio ice cream. I noted all these details.
Her father got up very late. He told her he worked nights. When he wasn’t there, an older Flemish woman looked after her. And then, he started talking about his departure for Egypt. The plan was for her to come join him there after a few months, with the Flemish woman.
Despite the notes I was gathering, I couldn’t fill the gaps in
his life story. For instance, what had Harry Dressel been doing until 1937?
I intended to go to Amsterdam to pursue my research and I had sent two Dutch newspapers a brief ad for the “Information Wanted” column, with Dressel’s photo. “Anyone with information about the activities of the variety artist and singer Harry Dressel before 1937, please write: P. Modiano, c/o Dressel, 123-bis Avenue Malakoff, Paris.” No reply. I placed another request in the classifieds of a major Paris daily: “Anyone with detailed information, professional or otherwise, about the singer-variety artist Harry Dressel during his time in Egypt, July 1951–Jan. 1952, or any details on his life, please call urgently, P. Modiano, Malakoff-10-28.”
This time someone came forward, a certain Georges Jansenne, who had been, he said on the phone, Dressel’s impresario in “the final years.” He had a nervous voice, and I made an appointment to see him. He was distrustful. He asked if “this was a trap.” He preferred to meet in a public place, and suggested a café on Place Victor-Hugo. I agreed to his conditions. The book, first and foremost.
I’d told him he would recognize me because I was six and a half feet tall, and I saw someone wave to me from the back of the terrace at the Scossa. I sat at his table. You could tell he had been very blond and curly, but over time, his blond hair, eyes, and complexion had faded. The man was translucent. He gave me an albino gaze.
“So, you’re interested in Harry Dressel? What is it you want to know?”
His voice was almost inaudible. It was as if it had traveled years and years to reach me, and that it belonged to someone no longer of this world.
“I know his daughter,” I said.
“What daughter? Dressel never had a daughter . . .”
He gave me a washed-out smile.
“I’m pleased that a boy your age cares about Dressel . . . As for me . . .”
I leaned in closer, so feeble was his voice. A sigh.
“As for me, I’d long forgotten about him . . . But when I read his name in your want ad . . . it gave me a pang.”
He laid a hand on my arm, a hand with very pale, very thin skin, through which I could make out his bones and the entire network of veins.
Family Record Page 11
