My father’s other acquaintances under the Occupation, at least the ones I know about: an Italian banker, Georges Giorgini-Schiff, and his girlfriend, Simone, who would later marry Pierre Foucret, the owner of the Moulin Rouge. Giorgini-Schiff had his offices at 4 Rue de Penthièvre. My father bought a large pink diamond from him, the “Southern Cross,” which he’d try to resell after the war, when he was destitute. Giorgini-Schiff was arrested by the Germans in September 1943, following the Italian armistice. During the Occupation, he had introduced my parents to a Doctor Carl Gerstner, economic adviser at the German embassy, whose girlfriend, Sybil, was Jewish, and who would apparently become a “major” figure in East Berlin after the war. Annet Badel: former attorney, director of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 1944. My father did some black marketeering with him and his son-in-law, Georges Vikar. Badel had sent my mother a typescript of Sartre’s No Exit, which he planned to stage at the Vieux-Colombier in May 1944, under its initial title, “Other People.” That script of “Other People” was still lying at the back of a wardrobe in my room on the fifth floor of Quai de Conti when I was fifteen. Badel thought my mother kept in touch with the Germans through the Continental Films production company, and that she could help him obtain a censorship visa for the play more quickly.
Other close associates of my father’s: André Camoin, antiques dealer, Quai Voltaire; Maria Chernichev, a daughter of Russian nobility but “déclassée,” with whom he conducted some huge black market deals; and a certain “M. Fouquet,” with whom he conducted more modest ones. This Fouquet had a shop on Rue de Rennes and lived in a small private house in the Paris suburbs.
I close my eyes and I see Lucien P. arriving, with his heavy footstep, from the deepest recesses of the past. I believe his job consisted of acting as middleman and introducing people to one another. He was very fat, and in my childhood, whenever he sat on a chair I was always afraid it would collapse under his weight. When he and my father were young, Lucien P. was the long-suffering lover of the actress Simone Simon, whom he followed around like a big poodle. And also a friend of Sylviane Quimfe, a pool shark and adventuress, who under the Occupation would become the Marquise d’Abrantès and the mistress of one of the Rue Lauriston gang. People on whom you can’t dwell at length. Shady travelers at best, passing through a train station concourse without my ever knowing their final destination, supposing they even had one. To finish with this list of phantoms, I should mention the two brothers, who might have been twins: Ivan and Alexandre S. The latter had a girlfriend, Inka, a Finnish dancer. They must have been real grands seigneurs of the black market, because under the Occupation they celebrated their “first billion” in an apartment in the massive edifice at 1 Avenue Paul-Doumer, where Ivan S. lived. He fled to Spain at the Liberation, as did André Gabison. As for Alexandre S., I wonder what became of him. But is there really any point asking? My heart goes out to those whose faces appeared on the German wanted posters, the “Affiche Rouge.”
Jean de B. and the antiques dealer from Brussels left the apartment on the Quai de Conti in early 1943, and my parents moved in. Before I finally get sick of all this and no longer have the heart or the energy to continue, here are a few more scraps of their life at that distant time, but as they lived it in the chaos of the present.
They sometimes hid out in Ablis, at the Chateau du Bréau, with Henri Lagroua and his girlfriend Denise. The Chateau du Bréau was abandoned. It belonged to some Americans who had fled France because of the war and given them the keys. In the countryside, my mother took motorcycle rides with Lagroua on his 500 cc BSA. She spent the months of July and August 1943 with my father at an inn in Varenne-Saint-Hilaire, the Petit Ritz. Giorgini-Schiff, Simone, Gerstner, and his girlfriend, Sybil, joined them there. Swimming in the Marne. The inn was home to several outlaws and their “wives,” among whom a certain “Didi” and his companion, “Mme Didi.” The men drove away in the morning to attend to their dirty work and returned from Paris very late at night. Once, my parents overheard an argument in the room above theirs. A woman called her man a “lousy cop” and threw wads of cash out the window, berating him for bringing back all that money. Police stooges? Gestapo henchmen? Toddie Werner, aka Mme Sahuque, at whose home my parents had met, barely managed to avoid being picked up at the beginning of 1943. She injured herself jumping from a window of her apartment. There was a warrant out for the arrest of one of my father’s oldest friends, Sacha Gordine, as attested by a memo from the Legal Status Bureau in the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs to the head of an “Investigation and Verification Division”: “April 6, 1944. Per the above-referenced note, I had requested that you proceed without delay to arrest the Jew Sacha Gordine for infraction of the Law of June 2, 1941. Pursuant to this note, you indicated that this individual had abandoned his present domicile without leaving a forwarding address. However, he has lately been observed riding his bicycle in the streets of Paris. I therefore request that you kindly pay another visit to his domicile so as to follow up on my note of January 25th last.”
I remember that my father mentioned this period, once only, one evening when we were on the Champs-Elysées. He pointed out the end of Rue de Marignan, where they had taken him away in February 1942. And he told me of a second arrest, in the winter of 1943, after “someone” had denounced him. He had been brought to the Depot, from where “someone” had freed him. That evening, I felt that he wanted to unburden himself, but the words wouldn’t come. He said only that the Black Maria had made the rounds of the police stations before reaching the lockup. At one of the stops, a young girl had got on and sat across from him. Much later I tried, in vain, to pick up her trace, not knowing whether it was the evening in 1942 or in 1943.
In the spring of 1944, my father received anonymous telephone calls at the Quai de Conti. A voice addressed him by his real name. One afternoon, when he was out, two French plainclothesmen rang at the door and asked for M. Modiano. My mother told them she was just a young Belgian working at Continental, a German company. She was subletting a room in the apartment from a man named Henri Lagroua and couldn’t help them. They promised to come back. My father, to avoid them, left the Quai de Conti. I imagine these were not members of Schweblin’s Jewish Affairs police but men from the Investigation and Verification Division—as in Sacha Gordine’s case. Or else they were sent by Superintendent Permilleux of the Prefecture. Later, I tried to put faces to all those names, but they remained firmly ensconced in the shadows, with their odor of rotten leather.
My parents resolved to leave Paris as quickly as possible. Christos Bellos, the Greek my mother had met at B.’s, knew a girl who lived on a property near Chinon. The three of them took refuge with her. My mother brought along her winter sportswear, in case they had to flee even farther. They hid in that house in the Touraine until the Liberation and would return to Paris, on bicycles, only when the American troops arrived.
Back in Paris at the beginning of September 1944, my father was hesitant about returning right away to the Quai de Conti, fearing that the police would again be after him—this time because of his illegal activities as a black marketeer. My parents lived in a hotel at the corner of Avenue de Breteuil and Avenue Duquesne, the same Alcyon de Breteuil where my father had already hid out in 1942. He sent my mother on ahead to Quai de Conti to get the lay of the land. She was summoned by the police and subjected to a lengthy interrogation. Since she was a foreigner, they wanted to know the precise reason for her arrival in Paris in 1942 under German patronage. She explained that she was engaged to a Jew with whom she’d been living for two years. The police questioning her were no doubt colleagues of the ones who’d tried to arrest my father under his real name a few months earlier. Or the same ones. They must now have been searching for him through his aliases, unable to identify him.
They released my mother. That evening at the hotel, beneath their windows, women strolled with American GIs along the median strip running down Avenue de Breteuil, and one of them tried to mak
e an American understand how many months they’d been waiting for them. She counts on her fingers in English: “One, two …” But the American doesn’t get it and instead imitates her, counting on his own fingers: One, two, three, four … And so on and so forth. After several weeks, my father left the Alcyon de Breteuil. Back at the Quai de Conti, he discovered that his Ford, which he’d stashed in a garage in Neuilly, had been commandeered in June by the Vichy militia, the Milice, and it was in that Ford, its bullet-riddled body impounded as evidence by the investigating detectives, that Georges Mandel had been assassinated.
On August 2, 1945, my father went by bike to register my birth at the town hall of Boulogne-Billancourt. I imagine him returning through the deserted streets of Auteuil and alongside the silent quays of that summer.
Then he decided we’d live in Mexico. The passports were ready. At the last minute, he changed his mind. He came this close to leaving Europe after the war. Thirty years later, he went to die in Switzerland, a neutral country. In the meantime, he moved around a lot: Canada, Guyana, Equatorial Africa, Colombia … He was searching for El Dorado, in vain. And I wonder whether he wasn’t also trying to flee the Occupation years. He never told me what he had felt, deep inside, in Paris during that period. Fear? The strange sensation of being hunted simply because someone had classified him as a specific type of prey, when he himself didn’t really know what he was? But one shouldn’t speak for others and I’ve always been reticent about breaking silences, even when they do you harm.
Nineteen forty-six. My parents were still living at 15 Quai de Conti, on the fourth and fifth floors. In 1947, my father would also rent the third floor. My father’s relative and rather fleeting prosperity lasted until that year, at which point he entered what they call “splendid poverty.” He worked with Giorgini-Schiff, with one M. Tessier, a citizen of Costa Rica, and with a baron Louis de la Rochette. He was the close friend of a certain Z., who was mixed up in the “wine scandal” of 1946. My maternal grandparents came to Paris from Antwerp to look after me. I spent all my time with them, and I spoke only Flemish. In 1947, on October 5, my brother, Rudy, was born. Since the Liberation, my mother had been taking acting classes at the Vieux-Colombier school. In 1946 she landed a minor role in Auprès de ma blonde at the Théâtre de la Michodière. In 1949, she had a bit part in the film Rendezvous in July.
That summer of 1949, in Cap-d’Antibes and on the Côte Basque, she spent time with a playboy of Russian origin, Vladimir Rachevsky, and with the marquis d’A., a Basque who wrote poetry. That’s something I would learn later on. We stayed alone in Biarritz for nearly two years, my brother and I. We lived in a small apartment in the Casa Montalvo, and the woman who looked after us was the caretaker of that house. I don’t have a very clear memory of her face.
In September 1950, we were baptized at the church of Saint-Martin in Biarritz, without my parents being present. According to the baptism certificate, my godfather was a mysterious “Jean Minthe,” whom I didn’t know. In October 1950 I went to school for the first time, at Sainte-Marie de Biarritz, in the Casa Montalvo neighborhood.
One afternoon when school let out, there was no one waiting for me. I tried to go home on my own, but as I crossed the street I was knocked down by a van. The driver brought me back to the nuns, who placed an ether-soaked pad over my face to put me to sleep. Since then, I’ve been quite sensitive to the smell of ether. Overly sensitive. Ether has the curious ability to remind me of pain, then immediately erase it. Memory and amnesia.
We returned to Paris in 1951. One Sunday afternoon I was in the wings of the Théâtre Montparnasse, where my mother was playing a small part in Le Complexe de Philémon. My mother was onstage. I got scared and started to cry. Suzanne Flon, who was also in the cast, gave me a postcard to quiet me down.
The apartment on the Quai de Conti. On the third floor, in the evening, we heard voices and bursts of laughter from the room next to ours, where my mother entertained her friends from Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I seldom saw her. I can’t recall a single act of genuine warmth or protectiveness from her. I was always on my guard around her. Her sudden flares of temper upset me deeply, and since I went to catechism, I prayed for God to forgive her. The fourth floor was where my father had his office. He was often there with two or three others. They sat in armchairs or on the arms of the sofa, talking among themselves. They took turns making phone calls. And they tossed the receiver back and forth to each other, like a rugby ball. Now and then, my father would hire young girls, students at the Beaux-Arts, to look after us. He had them answer the phone and say he “wasn’t there.” He dictated his letters to them.
At the start of 1952, my mother handed us over to a friend, Suzanne Bouquerau, who lived in a house at 38 Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne, in Jouy-en-Josas. I attended the Jeanne-d’Arc school at the end of the street, and after that the local public school. My brother and I were choirboys at midnight Mass in 1952, in the village church. First readings: The Last of the Mohicans, which I found incomprehensible but read all the way to the end. The Jungle Book. Andersen’s fairy tales illustrated by Adrienne Ségur. Aymé’s The Wonderful Farm.
Strange women came and went at 38 rue du Docteur-Kurzenne, among them Zina Rachevsky; Suzanne Baulé, known as Frede, the manager of Carroll’s, a nightspot on Rue de Ponthieu; and a certain Rose-Marie Krawell, owner of a hotel on Rue du Vieux-Colombier, who drove an American car. They wore men’s jackets and shoes, and Frede wore a tie. We played with Frede’s nephew.
From time to time, my father would come visit us accompanied by his friends and a sweet young blonde, Nathalie, an airline stewardess he’d met on one of his trips to Brazzaville. On Thursday afternoons, we listened to children’s programs on the radio. On other days, I sometimes heard the news broadcasts. The announcer was reporting the trial of those who had committed the MASSACRE AT ORADOUR. The sound of those words freezes my blood, today as much as it did back then, when I didn’t really understand what they meant.
One evening, during one of his visits, my father was sitting across from me in the living room of the house on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne, near the bow window. He asked what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t know what to answer.
One morning in February 1953, my father came to collect us, my brother and me, in the empty house, and drove us back to Paris. Later, I learned that Suzanne Bouquerau had been arrested for burglary. Between Jouy-en-Josas and Paris, the mystery of those suburbs that weren’t yet suburbs. The ruined chateau and, in front of it, the tall grass in the meadow where we flew our kite. The woods at Les Metz. And the large wheel of the water mill in Marly, which spun with the noise and coolness of a waterfall.
From 1953 to 1956 we lived in Paris, and my brother and I attended the local school on Rue du Pont-de-Lodi. We also took catechism at the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. We often saw Father Pachaud, who officiated at Saint-Germain-des-Prés and lived in a studio on Rue Bonaparte. I found a letter that Father Pachaud wrote to me at the time. “Monday, July 18. I imagine you must be building sandcastles on the beach…. When the tide comes in, the best you can do is run for it! It’s like when the whistle blows at the end of recess in the schoolyard of Pont-de-Lodi! Did you know it’s very hot in Paris right now? Luckily we get storms from time to time that cool down the temperature. If Catechism were still ongoing, you’d be pouring your schoolmates endless glasses of peppermint water from the white pitcher. Don’t forget that a month from now, on August 15th, it will be the Feast of the Assumption. You must take Holy Communion on that day to gladden the heart of your celestial mother, the Blessed Virgin. She will be pleased with her Patrick if you work hard to make her happy. You know that even on holiday, one mustn’t forget to thank the Good Lord for all the wonderful times he gives us. Goodbye, my little Patrick. I embrace you with all my heart, Father Pachaud.” The catechism classes were held on the top floor of a decrepit building at 4 Rue de l’Abbaye—which today contains opulent apartments—and in a meeting hall on Place de Furstenberg that h
as since become a luxury boutique. The faces have changed. I no longer recognize the neighborhood of my childhood, as Jacques Prévert or Father Pachaud would no longer recognize it.
On the other bank of the Seine were the mysteries of the Louvre courtyard, the two squares of the Carrousel, and the Tuileries, where my brother and I spent long afternoons. Black stone and leaves from the chestnut trees in the sun. The theater of greenery. The mountain of dead foliage against the foundation wall of the terrace under the Jeu de Paume. We assigned numbers to the alleyways. The empty fountain. The statue of Cain and Abel in one of the two bygone Carrousel squares. And the statue of La Fayette in the other square. The bronze lion in the Carrousel gardens. The green pair of scales against the wall of the Terrasse du Bord de l’Eau. The ceramic and coolness of the “lavatory” underneath the Terrasse des Feuillants. The grounds-keepers. The rumble of the lawnmower engine, one sunny morning, on the grass near the fountain. The clock at the southern gate of the palace, its hands stopped for all eternity. And the fleur de lys branded on Milady’s shoulder. We drew up family trees, my brother and I, and strained to establish a lineage between Saint Louis and Henry IV. At age eight, I was deeply impressed by a film: The Greatest Show on Earth. One scene in particular: At night, the train full of circus performers slams to a halt, blocked by an American car. Reflections of moonlight. The Médrano Circus. The orchestra played between acts. The clowns, Rhum, Alex, and Drena. Street carnivals. The one in Versailles, with bumper cars painted mauve, yellow, green, navy blue, pink … The street fair at Invalides with Jonas the Whale. Garages, their smell of shadows and gasoline. Penumbra. Sounds and voices faded into echoes.
Pedigree Page 2
