Suspended Sentences

by Patrick Modiano

  We’d gone out together and had barely taken a few steps when I recognized the silhouette stationed at the corner of the walled street that bisects the graveyard: Gil the Mime. He was wearing a black jacket and black trousers, with an open-necked white shirt whose wide collar covered his lapels.

  “Well, well … There’s a familiar face,” Jansen muttered to me.

  He waited for us to walk by him, arms folded. We continued down the opposite sidewalk and pretended not to notice him. He crossed the street and planted himself right in our path, legs slightly parted. He crossed his arms again.

  “Think it’s going to come to blows?” Jansen asked me.

  We walked up to where he was standing and he blocked our way, hopping from foot to foot like a boxer about to throw a punch. I shoved him aside. His left hand landed on my cheek as if by reflex.

  “Come along,” Jansen said to me.

  And he led me away by the arm. The other man turned toward Jansen:

  “Hey, you! Shutterbug! What’s your hurry?”

  His voice had the metallic timbre and overly stressed diction of certain members of the Comédie Française. Nicole had told me he was also an actor and that he’d recorded himself on the soundtrack to his show, the last excerpt: a long passage from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. He was quite attached to it—apparently, it was the purple passage and crowning touch of his act.

  We kept walking toward Place Denfert-Rochereau. I looked back. In the distance, beneath the sun, I could make out only his black suit and brown hair. Was it because of the graveyard’s proximity? There was something lugubrious about his silhouette.

  “Is he following us?” Jansen asked.

  “Yes.”

  Then he told me that twenty years earlier, on the day when he was caught in a police roundup coming out of the George-V metro stop, he’d been sitting in the subway across from a brown-haired man in a dark suit. At first he’d taken him for a regular passenger but, a few minutes later, the man was among the team of plainclothesmen who were bringing them in to the lockup, he and about ten others. He had vaguely sensed the man following him in the subway corridors. Gil the Mime, with his black suit, reminded him of that plainclothesman.

  He was still following us, hands in his pockets. I heard him whistling a tune that used to terrify me when I was a child: “There Was a Little Ship.”

  We took a sidewalk table at the café where I’d first met Jansen. The other man stopped when he caught up to us and folded his arms. Jansen pointed at him for me.

  “He’s as clingy as that cop from twenty years ago,” he said. “For all we know, maybe it’s him.”

  The sun was blinding. In the harsh, shimmering light, a black spot was floating in front of us. It came closer. Now Gil the Mime stood out against the glare. Was he going to perform one of his shadow pantomimes for us, to a poem by Tristan Corbière?

  He stood there, next to our table. Then he shrugged his shoulders and with an arrogant air strode off toward the Denfert-Rochereau metro stop.

  “It’s time for me to leave Paris,” Jansen said. “This is all getting too tiresome and absurd.”

  The more I remember these details, the more I adopt Jansen’s point of view. In the few weeks when I knew him, he considered people and things from a great distance, and all that remained for him were vague reference points and hazy silhouettes. And, through a kind of reciprocity, those people and things lost their consistency on contact with him. Could Gil the Mime and his wife still be alive somewhere? Try as I might to convince myself and imagine the following situation, I can’t really believe in it: thirty years later, I run into them in Paris; the three of us have grown older; we sit at a sidewalk café table and calmly share our memories of Jansen and the spring of 1964. Everything that seemed so mysterious to me becomes clear and even ordinary.

  Such as the evening when Jansen had gotten together with several friends in the studio, just before leaving for Mexico—a “farewell party,” he said with a laugh …

  Remembering that evening, I feel a need to latch onto those elusive silhouettes and capture them as if in a photograph. But after so many years, outlines become blurred, and a creeping, insidious doubt corrodes the faces. So many proofs and witnesses can disappear in thirty years. And besides, I had felt even at the time that the contact between Jansen and his friends had already loosened. He would never see them again and he didn’t seem to mind. They were probably surprised Jansen had invited them at all, after not having heard from him in so long. Conversations started and almost immediately died. And Jansen seemed so absent, he who should have been the point in common for all those people … It was as if they’d found themselves by chance in the same waiting room. The small number of them only accentuated the malaise: four, sitting very far apart from one another. Jansen had set up a buffet, which added to the strangeness of the evening. Now and then, someone stood up and walked to the buffet to get a glass of whiskey or a cracker, and the others’ silence enshrouded the event in an exceptional solemnity.

  Among the guests at the “farewell party” were the Meyendorffs, a couple in their fifties whom Jansen had known for a long time: I’d catalogued a photo in which they figured in a garden with Colette Laurent. The man was dark, slim, with fine features, and wearing tinted glasses. He spoke in a very soft voice and was nice to me, even asking what I planned to do in life. He had been a doctor, but I don’t believe he still practiced. His wife, a small brunette, with hair pulled back in a bun and high cheekbones, had the strict air of a former ballet instructor and a slight American accent. The other two guests were Jacques Besse and Eugène Deckers, whom I’d spoken to on the telephone several times in Jansen’s absence.

  Jacques Besse had been a talented musician as a young man. Eugène Deckers devoted his leisure time to painting and had renovated a huge loft on the Ile Saint-Louis.1 Belgian by birth, he made a living playing supporting roles in English B movies, since he was bilingual. But I knew nothing of that at the time. That evening, I was content just to watch them without asking too many questions. I was at an age where one often finds oneself in strange company; all things considered, these people were no stranger than anyone else.

  Toward the end of the evening, the atmosphere relaxed. It was still light out and Eugène Deckers, trying to liven things up a bit, proposed that we all go have a drink outside, on the bench opposite the studio. We went out, leaving the door open. There were no more cars on Rue Froidevaux. We could hear the leaves trembling and the faraway rumble of traffic near Denfert-Rochereau.

  Deckers was carrying a tray laden with aperitifs. Behind him, Jansen was dragging one of the studio armchairs, which he set in the middle of the sidewalk. He gestured for Mme de Meyendorff to have a seat. He was suddenly the Jansen of old, the one who had spent his evenings with Robert Capa. Deckers played the maître d’, balancing the tray on his hand. With his dark, curly hair and pirate’s face, one could easily imagine him taking part in those boisterous evenings Jansen had told me about, when Capa would cart him around in his green Ford. The awkwardness from earlier had lifted. Dr. de Meyendorff was seated on the bench next to Jacques Besse and was talking to him in his soft voice. Standing on the sidewalk, holding their glasses as if at a cocktail party, Mme de Meyendorff, Jansen, and Deckers were having a conversation. Mme de Meyendorff ended up sitting in the armchair, in the open air. Jansen turned to Jacques Besse:

  “Will you sing us ‘Cambriole’?”

  The song, written when he was twenty-two, had once made Jacques Besse’s reputation. He had even been held up as leader of a new generation of musicians.

  “No, I don’t feel like it …”

  He gave a sad smile. He had stopped writing music long ago.

  Their voices now blended in the silence of the street: Dr. de Meyendorff’s, very soft and very slow; his wife’s, deeper; Deckers’s, punctuated by great bursts of laughter. Only Jacques Besse, a smile on his lips, remained silent on the bench, listening to de Meyendorff. I stood a bit apart, watching t
he entrance to the street that cut through the cemetery: maybe Gil the Mime would show up and keep his distance, arms crossed, thinking Nicole was coming to join us. But no.

  At a certain moment, Jansen came up to me and said, “So? Happy? It’s beautiful out this evening … Life is just starting for you …”

  And it was true: I still had all those long years ahead of me.

  Jansen had spoken to me several times of the Meyendorffs. He had seen a lot of them after the deaths of Robert Capa and Colette Laurent. Mme de Meyendorff was a believer in the occult sciences and spiritualism. Dr. de Meyendorff—I’ve come across the calling card he gave me at the “farewell party”: Doctor Henri de Meyendorff, 12 Rue Ribéra, Paris XVI, Auteuil 28-15, and Le Moulin, Fossombrone (Seine-et-Marne)—occupied his leisure time studying Ancient Greece and had written a short book on the myth of Orpheus.2

  For several months Jansen had attended séances organized by Mme de Meyendorff. Their goal was to make the dead talk. I feel an ingrained distrust and skepticism toward this sort of activity, but I can understand why Jansen would turn to it in his time of affliction. One would like to make the dead talk; one would especially like them to come back for real, and not merely in our dreams where they stand beside us, but so far away and so absent …

  From what he’d confided, he had known the Meyendorffs long before the time when they’d figured in the photo, in the garden with Colette Laurent. He’d met them when he was nineteen. Then the war had broken out. Since Mme de Meyendorff was American, she and her husband had set sail for the United States, leaving Jansen the keys to their Paris apartment and their country house, where he had spent the first two years of the Occupation.

  I’ve often thought that the Meyendorffs would have been the people most likely to provide information about Jansen. When he left Paris, I had finished my work: all the materials I’d gathered about him were in the red notebook, the alphabetical index, and the album Snow and Sun, which he’d been kind enough to give me. Yes, if I had wanted to write a book about Jansen, I’d have had to go see the Meyendorffs and take notes on what they said.

  Some fifteen years ago, I was leafing through the red Clairefontaine notebook and, discovering Dr. de Meyendorff’s calling card in its pages, I dialed his phone number, but it was “no longer in service.” The doctor wasn’t listed in that year’s phone book. To settle the matter once and for all, I went to 12 Rue Ribéra, where the concierge told me she didn’t know anyone by that name in the building.

  That Saturday in June, so close to summer vacation season, it was very warm at around two in the afternoon. I was alone in Paris, with the prospect of a long, idle day ahead of me. I decided to go to the other address on the doctor’s card, in the Seine-et-Marne region. Naturally, I could have tried information to find out if a Meyendorff still lived in Fossombrone, and if so call him on the phone, but I decided I’d rather see for myself, on site.

  I took the metro to the Gare de Lyon, then bought a ticket for Fossombrone at the window for the commuter trains. I had to change at Melun. The compartment I entered was empty, and I was practically giddy at the thought of having found a purpose to my day.

  It was while waiting on the platform of Melun station for the branch line to Fossombrone that my mood shifted. The early afternoon sun, the few travelers, and the thought of visiting people whom I’d only seen once, fifteen years before, and who had probably either died or forgotten me, suddenly made everything seem unreal.

  There were two of us in the small local train: a woman in her sixties, carrying a shopping bag, had sat down opposite me.

  “Good lord, this heat …”

  I was reassured at hearing her voice, but surprised that it was so clear, with a slight echo. The leather of the seats was burning hot. There wasn’t a single area in the shade.

  “Will we arrive in Fossombrone soon?” I asked her.

  “It’s the third stop.”

  She rummaged through her shopping bag and finally found what she was looking for: a black wallet. She kept silent.

  I wished I could have broken the silence.

  She got off at the second stop. The local started up again and I was gripped by panic. I was alone now. I was afraid the train would take me on an endless journey, gradually gathering more and more speed. But it slowed down and stopped at a small station with tan walls on which I read FOSSOMBRONE in dark red letters. Inside the station, next to the ticket windows, a newspaper stand. I bought a daily after making sure of the date and skimmed the headlines.

  I asked the news dealer if he knew a house named Le Moulin. He told me to follow the main road out of the village and continue straight on to the edge of the forest.

  The shutters of the houses on the main road were closed to ward off the sun. No one was outdoors, and perhaps I should have worried about being alone in the middle of this unfamiliar village. The main road now turned into a wide path lined with plane trees, whose leaves barely let the sun’s rays filter through. The silence, the stillness of the leaves, the dapples of sunlight I walked on brought back the sensation of being in a dream. I again checked the date and the headlines on the newspaper I was holding, to keep me tied to the outside world.

  On the left, just at the edge of the forest, stood a low surrounding wall and green wooden gate on which LE MOULIN was written in white paint. I stepped back from the wall and went across the path to get a better view of the house. It seemed to be composed of several farm buildings cobbled together, with nothing rustic about them: the balcony, the large windows, and the ivy climbing up the façade made them look like bungalows. The neglected garden was now just a clearing.

  The surrounding wall made a right angle and continued for another hundred or so yards along a pathway that skirted the forest and led to several other properties. The one next to Le Moulin was a white villa shaped like a bunker with bay windows. It was separated from the pathway by a white fence and privet hedges. A woman in a straw hat was mowing the lawn and I was relieved to hear the hum of a motor break the silence.

  I waited until she was near the entrance gate. When she saw me, she shut off the lawnmower. She took off her straw hat. A blonde. She came over and opened the gate.

  “Does Doctor de Meyendorff still live at Le Moulin?”

  I’d had trouble pronouncing those syllables. They sounded weird.

  The blonde looked at me in surprise. My voice, my awkwardness, the sound of “Meyendorff” had something incongruous and formal about them.

  “Le Moulin hasn’t been lived in for a long time,” she said. “At least not since I’ve been in this house.”

  “Is it possible to go inside?”

  “You’d have to ask the caretaker. He comes three times a week. He lives in Chailly-en-Bière.”

  “You wouldn’t know where the owners are, by any chance?”

  “I think they live in the States.”

  In which case, there was a good chance it was still the Meyendorffs.

  “Are you interested in the house? I’m sure it’s for sale.”

  She had invited me into her garden and closed the gate behind me.

  “I’m writing a book on someone who used to live here and I just wanted to see what the place was like.”

  Once again I felt as if I’d used too formal a tone.

  She led me to the back of her garden. A fence marked the boundary with the neglected grounds of Le Moulin. There was a large hole in the fence and she pointed to it.

  “It’s easy to get to the other side …”

  I couldn’t believe it. Her voice was so gentle, her eyes so clear, she was being so thoughtful … She had moved closer to me and I suddenly wondered if I was doing the right thing prowling around an abandoned house, on “the other side,” as she said, instead of staying with her and getting to know her better.

  “While you’re over there, would you mind lending me your paper?”

  “With pleasure.”

  “I wanted to see what’s on television.”

  I han
ded her the paper. She said:

  “Take your time. And don’t worry—I’ll keep a lookout.”

  I slid through the hole in the fence and emerged into the clearing. I walked toward the house. As I moved forward, the clearing gave way to an unkempt lawn bisected by a gravel path. Up close Le Moulin looked as much like a bungalow as it had from the entrance gate. To the left, the main house extended into a chapel, on which the door had been removed and which was now just a storage shed.

  The shutters on the ground floor were closed, as were the two green panels of a French window. Two tall plane trees stood about ten yards apart, and their intermeshed foliage formed a roof of greenery that reminded me of a mall in a southern town. The sun was beating down, and it felt noticeably cooler in the shade.

  It was definitely here that Jansen had taken the picture of Colette Laurent and the Meyendorffs. I recognized the plane trees and, to the right, the ivy-covered well with its coping. In the red notebook, I had written, “Photo of the Meyendorffs and Colette Laurent in Fossombrone. Shadows. Spring or summer. Well. Date unknown.” I had asked Jansen what year the photo was taken, but he’d only shrugged.

  The house jutted out on the right and the shutters to one of the ground floor windows were open. I pressed my forehead against the glass. The sun’s rays projected a dappled light onto the back wall. A painting was hanging there: Mme de Meyendorff’s portrait. In a corner of the room, a mahogany desk behind which I could make out a leather armchair. Two similar armchairs near the window. Bookshelves on the right-hand wall, above a green velvet couch.

  I wanted to break into that room, where bit by bit the dust of time had settled. Jansen must have sat on those armchairs often and I could imagine him, on some late afternoon, reading a book from the library. He had come here with Colette Laurent. And, later, it was no doubt in this office that Mme de Meyendorff had called upon the dead.

  Next door, on the lawn, the blonde had gone back to work, and I heard the peaceful, reassuring hum of the motor.