Suspended Sentences

by Patrick Modiano

  He sat a bit stiffly, legs crossed, at the very end of the sofa, as if he were only visiting. My girlfriend and I didn’t try to break the silence. The room, with its white walls, was very light. The two chairs and the sofa were placed too far from each other, creating a feeling of emptiness. It was as if Jansen had already stopped living there. The three suitcases, whose leather reflected the sunlight, suggested imminent departure.

  “If you’re interested,” he said, “I’ll show you the photos when they’re developed.”

  I had jotted down his phone number on a cigarette pack. Besides, he’d added, he was in the book. Jansen, 9 Rue Froidevaux. DANton 75-21.

  At times, it seems, our memories act much like Polaroids. In nearly thirty years, I hardly ever thought about Jansen. We’d known each other over a very short period of time. He left France in June of 1964, and I’m writing this in April 1992. I never received word from him and I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. The memory of him had remained dormant, but now it has suddenly come flooding back this early spring of 1992. Is it because I came across the picture of my girlfriend and me, on the back of which a blue stamp says Photo by Jansen. All rights reserved? Or for the simple reason that every spring looks the same?

  Today the air was light, the buds had burst on the trees in the gardens of the Observatoire, and the month of April 1992 merged by an effect of superimposition with the month of April 1964. The memory of Jansen pursued me all afternoon and would follow me forever: Jansen would remain someone I’d barely had time to know.

  Who can tell? Someone else will write a book about him, illustrated with the pictures he’ll find. There’s a series of small black paperbacks devoted to famous photographers: why not one about him? He deserves it. In the meantime, it would make me glad if these pages rescued him from oblivion—though that oblivion is his own doing, deliberately sought.

  I think I should set down the few biographical facts I’ve managed to piece together: He was born in 1920 in Antwerp and he barely knew his father. He and his mother were of Italian nationality. In 1938, after several years spent studying in Brussels, he left Belgium for Paris. There, he worked as an assistant to several photographers. He met Robert Capa, who in January 1939 brought him to Barcelona and Figueras, where they followed the exodus of Spanish refugees toward the French border. In July of that same year, he covered the Tour de France with Capa. When war was declared, Capa offered to take him to the United States and obtained two visas. At the last moment, Jansen decided to stay in France. He spent the first two years of the Occupation in Paris. Thanks to an Italian journalist, he worked for the photo services of the magazine Tempo. But despite this, he was picked up during a raid and interned as a Jew at the Drancy transit camp. He stayed there until the day the Italian consulate managed to have its citizens freed. Then he took refuge in the Haute-Savoie and waited out the rest of the war. Back in Paris, he was reunited with Capa and accompanied him to Berlin. During the following years, he worked for Magnum. After Capa’s death and that of Colette Laurent—the woman friend whose portrait I’d seen on the wall of his studio—he withdrew further and further into himself.

  I feel somewhat awkward giving these details, and I can imagine how embarrassed Jansen would be if he saw them set down here in black and white. He was a man of few words. He did everything he could to be forgotten, including leaving for Mexico in June 1964 and completely dropping out of sight. He often told me, “When I get there, I’ll send a postcard so you have my address.” I waited for it in vain. I doubt he’ll ever come across these pages. If he were to, then I’d receive that postcard, from Cuernavaca or somewhere else, with just these words: “Be quiet.”

  But no, I wouldn’t receive a thing. I only have to look at his photos to rediscover the quality he possessed in art as in life, which is so precious but so hard to acquire: keeping silent. One afternoon I’d paid him a visit and he’d given me the picture of my girlfriend and me on the bench. He’d asked what I was planning to do with my future, and I’d answered, “Write.”

  That activity struck him as “squaring the circle”—the exact phrase he’d used. Indeed, writing is done with words, whereas he was after silence. A photograph can express silence. But words? That he would have found interesting: managing to create silence with words. He had burst out laughing.

  “So, are you going to try? I’m counting on you. But most of all, don’t lose any sleep over it …”

  Of all the punctuation marks, he told me, ellipses were his favorite.

  I asked him about the pictures he’d been taking for nearly twenty-five years. He pointed to the three leather suitcases, stacked one on top of the other.

  “I put everything in there … If you’re interested …”

  He stood up and nonchalantly opened the topmost suitcase. It was full to the brim and a few pictures fell out. He didn’t even bother picking them up. He rummaged around inside, and other photos spilled from the valise and lay scattered on the floor. He finally fished out a volume and handed it to me.

  “Here … I did this when I was about your age. This must be the last remaining copy in the world. It’s yours …”

  It was a copy of Sun and Snow, published in Geneva, Switzerland, by the publisher La Colombière in 1946.

  I picked the prints up off the floor and put them back in the suitcase. I said it was a shame to leave them all helter-skelter like that, that someone should organize and catalogue the contents of the three suitcases. He looked at me in surprise.

  “You won’t have time … I have to leave for Mexico next month.”

  Still, I could try to finish by then. I had nothing else to do during the day, since I’d dropped out of school and had earned a little money—enough to live on for a year—from the sale of some furniture, paintings, carpets, and books from an abandoned apartment.

  I’ll never know what Jansen thought of my initiative. I think he probably didn’t care. But he gave me the spare key to the studio so I could come work when he was out. I was often all alone in the large room with its white walls. And every time Jansen came home, he looked startled to see me. One evening as I was sorting the photos, he took a seat on the sofa and watched me without a word. Finally, he asked, “Why are you doing this?”

  That evening, he suddenly seemed intrigued by my activities. I’d answered that these pictures had documentary value, since they bore witness to people and things that no longer existed. He had shrugged.

  “I can’t stand to look at them anymore …”

  His voice took on a serious tone I’d never heard him use.

  “You understand, kid, it’s like every one of those pictures was a kind of guilty conscience for me … It’s better to start from scratch …”

  When he used an expression like “squaring the circle” or “start from scratch,” his accent became more pronounced.

  He was forty-four years old at the time and today I understand better his state of mind. He would have liked to forget “all that,” come down with amnesia. But he hadn’t always felt this way. Indeed, on the back of every photo, he had written a detailed caption with the date he’d taken it, the place, the name of the person depicted, and even a few additional remarks. I pointed this out.

  “I must have been as obsessive as you back then … But I’ve changed a lot since …”

  The telephone rang, and he said what he always did:

  “Tell whoever it is I’m not here.”

  A woman’s voice. She had already called several times. A certain Nicole.

  I was always the one who answered. Jansen didn’t even want to know who’d called. And I pictured him there alone, sitting at the far end of the sofa, listening to the rings as they followed each other in the silence.

  Sometimes the doorbell rang. Jansen had asked me never to answer, because “people” —he used that vague term—might come in and wait for him in the studio. Every time it rang, I hid behind the sofa so that I couldn’t be seen through the picture window from the street. It sudde
nly felt as if I’d entered the studio illegally and I was afraid the people ringing, spotting a suspicious presence inside, would go report it to the nearest precinct.

  The “last square”—his term—was coming to hound him. And in fact, I’d noticed it was always the same people who phoned. That woman Nicole, and also “the Meyendorffs,” as Jansen referred to them: the man or woman asked that he “call them back right away.” I jotted down the names on a piece of paper and gave him the messages, despite his complete lack of interest. I recently found, among other souvenirs, one of those pieces of paper bearing the names of Nicole and the Meyendorffs, along with the two other people who often rang up: Jacques Besse and Eugène Deckers.

  Jansen called them the “last square” because the scope of his relations had gradually narrowed over the preceding years. I finally realized that Robert Capa’s death, and Colette Laurent’s not long afterward, had opened a void in his life.

  I didn’t know much about Colette Laurent. She figured in a number of Jansen’s photos, but he only spoke of her indirectly.

  Twenty years later, I discovered that I’d met this woman in my childhood and that I could have told Jansen something about her myself. But I hadn’t recognized her in the photos. All I had kept of her was an impression, a scent, dark brown hair, and a gentle voice asking me if I studied hard in school. Certain coincidences risk passing unnoticed; certain people have appeared in our lives on several occasions without our realizing it.

  One spring, even earlier than the one when I met Jansen, when I was about ten years old, I was walking with my mother and we met a woman at the corner of Rue Saint-Guillaume and Boulevard Saint-Germain. We strolled together for a while, and she and my mother talked. What they said is lost in the mists of time, but I remembered the sundrenched sidewalk and her name: Colette. Later, I heard she’d died in dubious circumstances during a trip abroad, and it had struck me. I had to wait several decades for a link to emerge between those two moments of my life: the afternoon on the corner of Rue Saint-Guillaume and my visits to Jansen’s studio on Rue Froidevaux. Just half an hour on foot from one point to the other, but such a long distance in time … And the link was Colette Laurent, about whom I know almost nothing, except that she’d been very important to Jansen and that she’d lived a turbulent life. She had come to Paris when she was very young, from a distant province.

  Not long ago I tried to imagine her first day in the capital and I felt sure it was much like today, with long stretches of clear sky alternating with sudden showers. Wind from the Atlantic shakes the tree branches and turns umbrellas inside out. Pedestrians huddle in doorways. You can hear the seagulls crying. Sunlight glistens on wet sidewalks near the Quai d’Austerlitz and on the walls around the Jardin des Plantes. She walked for the first time through a city sluiced out and laden with promise. She had just arrived at the Gare de Lyon.

  Here’s another memory of Colette Laurent, from my childhood. In the summer, my parents would rent a tiny cottage in Deauville, near Avenue de la République. Colette Laurent had shown up unexpectedly one day. She looked very tired. She shut herself in the small living room and slept for two days straight. My mother and I spoke in whispers so as not to disturb her.

  On the morning when she finally woke up, she offered to take me to the beach. I walked next to her beneath the arcades. When we reached the Clément Marot bookstore, we crossed the street. She put her hand on my shoulder. Instead of continuing straight on to the beach, she dragged me to the Hôtel Royal. At the entrance, she said, “Go ask the man at the front desk if he has a letter for Colette.”

  I walked into the lobby and, stammering, asked the concierge if he had “a letter for Colette.” He didn’t seem surprised by the question. He handed me a very large, very thick brown envelope on which someone had written her name in blue ink: COLETTE.

  I exit the hotel and hand her the envelope. She opens it and looks inside. Still today I wonder what it contained.

  Then she walks with me to the beach. We sit on deckchairs, near the Soleil bar. At that time of day, there’s no one there but us.

  I had bought two red Clairefontaine notebooks, one for me, the other for Jansen, so that I could catalogue his photos in duplicate. I was afraid he’d misplace the fruit of my labors en route to Mexico, out of indifference or carelessness, so I decided to keep a copy. Today it makes me feel odd when I leaf through the pages: it’s like reading a very detailed catalogue of images that don’t exist. What became of them, when we’re not even sure what became of their maker? Did Jansen bring the three suitcases with him, or did he destroy it all before leaving? I had asked him what he was planning to do with those suitcases and he’d said that they were weighing him down, and that he especially didn’t want any “excess baggage.” But he didn’t offer to leave them with me in Paris. At best, they’ve now more or less rotted away in some suburb of Mexico City.

  One evening when I’d stayed in the studio later than usual, he came home just as I was copying over in the second notebook what I’d already written in the first. He had leaned over my shoulder:

  “That’s painstaking work, kid … Aren’t you tired?”

  I sensed a touch of sarcasm in his voice.

  “If I were you, I’d go further … I wouldn’t stop at just two notebooks … I’d make an alphabetical index of every person and place that appears in those photos …”

  He smiled. I was disconcerted. I felt he was laughing at me. The next day, I started compiling an alphabetical index in a large register. I was sitting on the sofa, among the piles of photos that I took from the suitcases a few at a time, and I wrote by turns in the two notebooks and in the register. This time, Jansen’s smile froze and he looked at me in amazement.

  “I was joking, kid … And you took me seriously …”

  But I wasn’t joking. I had taken on this job because I refused to accept that people and things could disappear without a trace. How could anyone resign himself to that? After all, Jansen had shown the same concern. Reading over the index, which I still have, I notice that a lot of his pictures were scenes of Paris or portraits. On the backs of the earliest ones he had written down where they’d been taken; otherwise it would have been hard for me to identify most of them. They showed steps, curbs, gutters, benches, shredded posters on walls or barricades. No taste for the picturesque, but simply his own eye, an eye whose sad and attentive expression I can still recall.

  Among the photos, on a sheet of letter paper, I had discovered some notes in Jansen’s hand, titled “Natural Light.” It was for an article that a film journal had requested, since he’d worked pro bono as a technical adviser to several young directors in the early sixties, teaching them how to use floodlights like American newsreel cameramen during the war. Why had those notes impressed me so deeply at the time? Since then, I’ve come to realize how hard it is to find what Jansen called “natural light.”

  He had told me that he shredded street posters himself to uncover the ones hidden beneath the newer strata. He pulled the strips down layer by layer and photographed them meticulously, stage by stage, down to the last scraps of paper that remained on the billboard or stone wall.

  I had numbered the photos in chronological order:

  325. Fence on Rue des Envierges

  326. Wall, Rue Gasnier-Guy

  327. Steps on Rue Lauzin

  328. Passerelle de la Mare

  329. Garage on Rue Janssen

  330. Site of the old cedar tree at the corner of Rue Alphonse-Daudet and Rue Leneveux

  331. Slope of Rue Westermann

  332. Colette, Rue de l’Aude

  I drew up a list of individuals whose portraits Jansen had taken. He had approached them at random, in the street, in cafés, while taking a walk.

  My walk, today, took me as far as the Orangerie in the Jardins du Luxembourg. I crossed the shaded area under the chestnut trees, near the tennis courts. I stopped at the bowling ground. Several men were playing a match. My attention was caught by the talles
t of them, who was wearing a white shirt. One of Jansen’s pictures came to mind, on the back of which was written a caption that I’d copied onto my list: Michel L., Quai de Passy. Date unknown. A young man in a white shirt resting his elbow on a marble mantelpiece in very bright light.

  Jansen clearly recalled the circumstances surrounding that photo. He was broke, and Robert Capa, who had connections, found him an easy, well-paying assignment. He had to go to an American woman’s home on the Quai de Passy, with all the necessary equipment for studio portraits.

  Jansen had been surprised by the size and luxuriousness of the apartment, the multiple balconies. The American woman was around fifty, still dazzling, but old enough to be her young French companion’s mother. He was the one Jansen was there to photograph. The American woman wanted several photos of this “Michel L.,” in the style of Hollywood headshots. Jansen had set up the spotlights as if he were accustomed to this type of work. And for six months he’d lived off the money he’d earned from those photos of “Michel L.”

  The more I watched the man preparing to toss his ball, the more I was sure I recognized “Michel L.” What had struck me about the picture were the eyes, close to the surface and slanted toward the temples, which gave “Michel L.” a strange look, as if he had compound eyes with an abnormally wide angle of vision. And the man before me had the same slanted eyes and profile as “Michel L.” The white shirt only accentuated the resemblance, despite his gray hair and pasty skin.

  The playing ground was surrounded by a metal edging, and I didn’t dare cross that boundary and disturb the game. There was more than forty years’ distance between the “Michel L.” whom Jansen had photographed and the bowls player today.

  He walked to the edging while one of his friends pitched the ball. He stood with his back to me.

  “Pardon me …”

  My voice was so blank that he didn’t hear.

  “Pardon me … There’s something I’d like to ask you.”