Pedigree

by Patrick Modiano

  Of my readings at the time (Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Joseph Peyré, Conan Doyle, Selma Lagerlöf, Karl May, Mark Twain, James Oliver Curwood, Stevenson, The Arabian Nights, the comtesse de Ségur, Jack London), I especially remember King Solomon’s Mines, the episode in which the young guide reveals his true identity as the king’s son. And two book titles set me dreaming: The Prisoner of Zenda and The Mystery Freighter.

  Our schoolmates on Rue du Pont-de-Lodi: Pierre Do-Kiang, a Vietnamese whose parents ran a small hotel on Rue Grégoire-de-Tours. Zdanevich, half black, half Georgian, the son of the Georgian poet Iliazd. Other friends: Gérard, who lived above a garage in Deauville, on Avenue de la République. A certain Ronnie—I can’t remember his face or where we met. We would play at his house near the Bois de Boulogne. I seem to recall that the moment we stepped through the front door, we were in London, one of those townhouses from Belgravia or Kensington. Later, when I read the Graham Greene story that became The Fallen Idol, I thought that Ronnie, about whom I knew nothing, could have been the protagonist.

  Holidays in Deauville in a small cottage near Avenue de la République, with my father’s girlfriend, Nathalie, the airline stewardess. My mother, on the rare occasions when she showed up, used it to entertain visiting friends, actors who were in a play at the Casino, and the Dutch friend from her youth, Joppie Van Allen. He belonged to the marquis de Cuevas’s ballet company. Thanks to him, I saw a ballet that bowled me over, La sonnambula. One day I accompanied my father to the lobby of the Hôtel Royal, where he was to meet a Mme Stern, who, he said, owned a racing stable. What use could this Mme Stern have possibly been to him? Every Thursday, first thing in the afternoon, my brother and I would go buy Tarzan at the news dealer’s opposite the church. It’s hot. We are the only ones in the street. Sunlight and shadow dapple the sidewalk. The scent of privet …

  In the summer of 1956, my brother and I lived in the cottage with my father and Nathalie, the airline stewardess. She had taken us on holiday, at Eastertime that same year, to a hotel in Villars-sur-Ollon. In Paris, one Sunday in 1954, my brother and I were standing in the wings of the Vieux-Colombier while my mother was on-stage. A certain Suzy Prim, who played the lead, snapped coldly that we didn’t belong here. Like many old hams, she didn’t like children. I sent her a letter: “Dear Madam, I wish you a very bad Christmas.” What had struck me about her was the look in her eyes, at once hard and anxious.

  On Sundays, with my father, we would take the number 63 bus to the Bois de Boulogne. The lake and the floating dock from which one embarked for the miniature golf course and the Chalet des Iles … One evening, at the Bois, we were waiting for the bus home and my father dragged us into narrow Rue Adolphe-Yvon. He stopped in front of a private hotel and said, “I wonder who’s living here now,” as if he knew the place. I saw him in his office that evening, combing through the street directory. I was intrigued. A decade or so later, I learned that during the Occupation, 6 Rue Adolphe-Yvon, a private hotel that is no longer standing (I returned to that street in 1967 to verify the spot at which we’d stopped: it corresponded to number 6), was the address of the black market “Otto Bureau.” And suddenly the stench of rot blends in with the smells of the riding clubs and dead leaves in the Bois. I also recall that sometimes on those afternoons, my brother, my father, and I would hop a random bus and ride it to the end of the line. Saint-Mandé. Porte de Gentilly …

  In October 1956, I became a boarder at the Montcel school in Jouy-en-Josas. I’ve attended all the schools in Jouy-en-Josas. The first nights in the dormitory were hard and I often felt like crying. But soon I devised a trick to bolster my courage: I focused my attention on a fixed point, a kind of talisman. In this case, a little black plastic horse.

  In February 1957, I lost my brother. One Sunday, my father and my Uncle Ralph came to collect me at the boarding school. On the road to Paris, my Uncle Ralph, who was driving, pulled the car over and stepped out, leaving me alone with my father. In the car, my father told me that my brother had died. I had spent the afternoon with him the previous Sunday, in our room on Quai de Conti. We had worked on our stamp collection. I had to return to school at five o’clock, and I’d explained that a theater troupe was going to put on a play for the students in the school’s small auditorium. I will never forget the look on his face, that Sunday.

  Apart from my brother, Rudy, his death, I don’t believe that anything I’ll relate here truly matters to me. I’m writing these pages the way one compiles a report or résumé, as documentation and to have done with a life that wasn’t my own. It’s just a simple film of deeds and facts. I have nothing to confess or elucidate and I have no interest in soul-searching or self-reflection. On the contrary, the more obscure and mysterious things remained, the more interesting I found them. I even looked for mystery where there was none. I lived through the events I’m recounting, up to the age of twenty-one, as if against a transparency—like in a cinematic process shot, when landscapes slide by in the background while the actors stand in place on a soundstage. I’d like to translate this impression, which many others have felt before me: everything paraded by like a transparency and I could not yet live my life.

  I was a boarder at the Montcel school until 1960. Four years of military-style discipline. Every morning, flag salutes. Parade marches. Company, halt. Stand at attention. Evening inspections of the dormitories. Bullying by a few senior-year “captains” charged with maintaining “order.” Electric clamor of the morning alarm. Showers in batches of thirty. Fitness trail. At ease. At attention. And the hours spent gardening, when, in a row, we raked up the dead leaves.

  One of my classmates that year was named Safirstein. He was with me in the green dormitory. He told me that his father had been a medical student in Vienna when he was twenty. In 1938, at the time of the Anschluss, the Nazis had humiliated Vienna’s Jews by forcing them to wash the sidewalks and paint the Star of David on the windows of their shops themselves. His father had suffered this bullying for a time, then fled Austria. One night, we decided to go explore inside the blockhouse at the far end of the park. This meant crossing the great lawn, and if one of the staff spotted us we could be severely punished. Safirstein had refused to join in this scouting expedition. The next day, my classmates ostracized him and called him a “chicken,” with that garrison-style boorishness that emerges when “the men” are among themselves. Safirstein’s father showed up unannounced at the college one afternoon. He wanted to talk to the entire dorm. He asked us nicely not to bully his son and to stop calling him “chicken.” This way of handling things amazed my classmates, Safirstein included. We were all sitting around the table in the teachers’ lounge. Safirstein was next to his father. Everyone made up in good spirits. I think his father gave us cigarettes. None of my schoolmates gave the incident any further thought. Not even Safirstein. But I had keenly felt the anxiousness of that man, who wondered if the nightmare he had suffered twenty years earlier wasn’t starting up again for his son.

  The Montcel school catered to the unloved, bastards, lost children. I remember a Brazilian who for a long while occupied the bed next to mine, who’d had no news of his parents for two years, as if they had left him in the checkroom of a forgotten station. Others were already smuggling blue jeans and sneaking past police roadblocks. Two of the students, two brothers, would even stand trial some twenty years later. Gilded youth, for the most part, but the gilding was tarnished, of poor alloy. Most of those fine young lads would have no future.

  My readings at the time. Some books left their mark: Fermina Márquez, The Penal Colony, Les Amours jaunes, The Sun Also Rises. In other books, I rediscovered the fantastic character of the streets: Marguerite de la nuit by Pierre Mac Orlan, Rien qu’une femme by Francis Carco, La Rue sans nom by Marcel Aymé. In the college infirmaries, there were still some old novels lying around that had survived the last two wars, and that stood quietly on the shelves for fear someone might haul them down to the basement. I remember reading Bazin’s The Childre
n of Alsace. But mainly, I read the first “Livres de Poche” that had just been published, with their purple cardboard bindings. Good novels and bad, indiscriminately. Many have since gone out of print. Among those books, several titles have retained their aroma: La Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche, La Rose de Bratislava, Marion des neiges.

  On Sundays, strolls with my father and one of his cronies of the time, Stioppa. My father saw a lot of him. He wore a monocle and his hair was so thick with pomade that it left a stain when he rested his head against the sofa. He had no discernible profession. He lived in a boardinghouse on Avenue Victor-Hugo. Sometimes Stioppa, my father, and I would go walking in the Bois de Boulogne.

  On another Sunday, my father took me to the boat show at the Quai Branly. We met a friend of his from before the war, “Paulo” Guerin. An aged young man wearing a blazer. I don’t remember whether he was also visiting the show or manning a booth there. My father explained that Paulo Guerin never did anything but ride horses, drive around in fancy cars, and seduce the ladies. Let that be a lesson to me: yes, indeed, in life, you have to have your diplomas. That late afternoon, my father seemed pensive, as if he’d just met a ghost. Each time I’ve found myself on the Quai Branly, I’ve thought of this Paulo Guerin and his slightly stocky build, his pasty-looking face under swept-back brown hair. And the question remained forever unanswered: whatever could he have been doing at the boat show that Sunday, without his diplomas?

  There was also a certain Charly d’Alton. It was especially with him and his old pal Lucien P. that my father tossed the phone back and forth like a rugby ball. His name reminded me of the Dalton Brothers in the comic books, and later I noticed that it was also the name of a friend of Alfred de Musset’s. And a man my father always called by his surname, Rosen (or Rozen). This Rosen (or Rozen) was the spitting image of the actor David Niven. I seem to recall that during the Spanish Civil War, he enlisted on the side of Franco. He could sit silently on the couch for hours. Even in my father’s absence. Even at night, I imagine. He was part of the furniture.

  Sometimes my father came with me on Monday mornings to the Rotonde at the Porte d’Orléans. That’s where I would catch the bus that took me back to school. We got up at six o’clock, and my father used the time before the bus arrived to hold appointments in the cafés around the Porte d’Orléans, lit with neon on those winter mornings when it was still pitch black outside. Hiss of the percolators. The people he saw there were different from the ones he met at the Claridge or the Grand Hôtel. They spoke in low voices. Stall hawkers, men with the ruddy complexion of traveling salesmen or the sly demeanor of provincial clerks. What did he want with them, exactly? They sported rural names like Quintard, Chevreau, Picard …

  One Sunday morning, we took a taxi to the Bastille neighborhood. My father had the driver stop about twenty times in front of apartment houses on Boulevard Voltaire, Avenue de la République, Boulevard Richard-Lenoir … Each time, he left an envelope with the concierge. A notice to former shareholders of a defunct company whose stock certificates he had unearthed? Something like the Union Minière Indochinoise? On another Sunday, he dropped off his envelopes along Boulevard Pereire.

  Sometimes, on Saturday evenings, we went to visit an elderly couple, the Facons, who lived in a minuscule apartment on Rue du Ruisseau, behind Montmartre. On the wall of the tiny living room, exhibited in a frame, was the military medal M. Facon had been awarded in World War I. He was a former printer who loved literature. He gave me a handsomely bound edition of Saint-Pol Roux’s book of poems La Rose et les épines du chemin. Under what circumstances had my father met him?

  I also remember a certain Léon Grunwald. He came to lunch with my father several times a week. Tall, with wavy gray hair, face like a spaniel’s, drooping eyes and shoulders. Much later, I was surprised to find a trace of the man in Jesús Ynfante’s book on the “Broglie Affair”: In 1968, the president of a company called Matesa “was seeking financing to the tune of fifteen to twenty million dollars.” He had got in touch with Léon Grunwald, “who had helped arrange the primary financing to Luxembourg.” A memorandum of understanding was signed by “Jean de Broglie, Raoul de Léon, and Léon Grunwald”; if the loan went through, they stood to earn a commission of five hundred thousand dollars. According to what I read, Grunwald had died in the interim. From exhaustion? It’s true that these kinds of people have demanding jobs and spend many a sleepless night. By day, they schedule countless meetings with one another to try to sign their “memoranda of understanding.”

  I would like to breathe purer air, my head is spinning, but still I recall several of my father’s “appointments.” One late morning I had accompanied him to the Champs-Elysées. We were welcomed by a short, bald, very vivacious man, in a cupboard-sized office where we could barely find room to sit. I thought he was one of the seven dwarves. He kept his voice down, as if he wasn’t supposed to be there.

  Normally, my father held his “appointments” in the lobby of the Claridge, where he took me on Sundays. One afternoon, I stayed to the side while he conferred in undertones with an Englishman. He tried to grab a sheet of paper the Englishman had just initialed, but the latter snatched it away too quickly. What “memorandum of understanding” could this have been? My father had an office in a large, ochre-colored building at 1 Rue Lord-Byron, where he headed the Société Africaine d’Entreprise, along with a secretary named Lucienne Wattier, a former model whom he addressed with the familiar tu. This is one of my first memories of the Paris streets: walking up Rue Balzac, then turning right onto Rue Lord-Byron. One could also reach this office by entering the Normandie cinema on the Champs-Elysées side and following a tangle of hallways.

  On the mantelpiece of my father’s room were several volumes of “maritime law,” which he was studying. Something to do with a cigar-shaped oil tanker he wanted to have built. My father’s Corsican lawyers: Maître Mariani, whom we would visit at home, and Maître Vizzavona. Sunday walks with my father and an Italian engineer, who held a patent for “pressure ovens.” My father became close friends with a certain M. Held, “water diviner,” who always wore a pocket watch on a chain. One evening, on the stairs, my father said something that I didn’t fully grasp at the time—one of the rare instances when he opened up to me: “One should never neglect the little details … Unfortunately, I’ve always neglected the little details.”

  In those years, 1957 and 1958, another of his cronies appeared, a certain Jacques Chatillon. I saw him again twenty years later, by which point he was calling himself James B. Chatillon. At the start of the Occupation he had married the granddaughter of a merchant whose secretary he was, and during that time he had been a horse trader in Neuilly. He sent me a letter in which he talked about my father: “Don’t be upset that he died alone. Your father didn’t mind being alone. He had great imagination—though to be honest, entirely devoted to his business—that he nourished carefully and that nourished his mind. He was never alone, for he was always ‘conspiring’ with some scheme or other, and that’s what gave him that strange air that many found so unnerving. He was curious about everything, even things he didn’t agree with. He managed to give an impression of calm, but he could easily turn violent. When something annoyed him, his eyes would flash. He opened them wide, instead of keeping them hidden under his heavy eyelids. Above all, he was a dilettante. What always shocked his contacts the most was his reluctance to speak, to make himself clear. He would mumble a few allusions … punctuated with one or two hand gestures and a ‘there you have it’ … then clear his throat once or twice to top it off. Along with his reluctance to speak went his reluctance to set things down on paper, which he explained away as being due to his illegible handwriting.”

  James B. Chatillon wanted me to write the biography of a friend of his, a Corsican mobster named Jean Sartore, who had just died and who’d associated with the Rue Lauriston gang and its boss, Lafont, during the Occupation. “I sincerely regret that you couldn’t write Jean Sartore’s memoirs, but you�
��re wrong to think he was an old friend of Lafont’s. He used Lafont as a screen for his gold and currency smuggling, since the Germans were after him even more than the French. That said, he knew plenty about the Lauriston bunch.”

  In 1969, after my second novel came out, he had phoned me and left a name and number where I could reach him. It was in care of a M. de Varga, who was later implicated in Jean de Broglie’s murder. I remember one Sunday when we walked around Mont Valérien, my father and I and this Chatillon, a stocky, brown-haired fellow, with lively black eyes under pale lids. He drove us there in an old Bentley with collapsed leather seats—the only asset he had left. After a while, he had to part with that, too, and would come to the Quai de Conti on a moped. He was deeply devout. I once asked him, provocatively, “What good is religion, anyway?” He had given me a biography of Pope Pius XI with this inscription: “For Patrick, so that he might learn ‘what good religion is’ …”

  Often my father and I were alone on Saturday evenings. We saw movies at the Champs-Elysées and the Gaumont Palace. One afternoon in June, we were walking—I don’t remember why—on Boulevard Rochechouart. The sun was very strong and we retreated into the darkness of a small movie house, the Delta. At the George V cinema, there was a documentary on the Nuremberg Trials, Hitler’s Executioners: at age thirteen, I discovered images of the extermination camps. Something changed for me that day. And what did my father think? We never talked about it, not even as we left the theater.

  On summer nights we would get ice cream at Ruc or the Régence. Dinner at L’Alsacienne on the Champs-Elysées, or at the Chinese restaurant on Rue du Colisée. In the evening, on the dark red leather-covered record player, we’d listen to test pressings of vinyl records he wanted to put on the market. And on his bedside table, I remember one book: How to Make Friends, which today helps me understand his solitude. One Monday morning during the holidays, I heard steps on the inner staircase leading to the fifth floor, where my room was. Then voices in the large bathroom next door. Bailiffs were carting away all of my father’s suits, shirts, and shoes. What ploy had kept them from repossessing the furniture?