Suspended Sentences

by Patrick Modiano

  I never went back to Fossombrone. And today, fifteen years later, I suppose Le Moulin has been sold and the Meyendorffs are finishing out their days somewhere in America. I haven’t had any recent news of the other people Jansen had invited to his “farewell party.” One afternoon in May 1974 I ran across Jacques Besse on Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, near the Théâtre du Gymnase. I’d held out my hand, but he hadn’t noticed and had walked away stiffly, without recognizing me, his eyes vacant, wearing a dark gray turtleneck and several days’ beard.

  One night a few months ago, very late, I had turned on the television, which was showing an English detective program adapted from Leslie Charteris’s The Saint, and I was surprised to see Eugène Deckers. The scene had been filmed in London in the 1960s, possibly the same year and same week that Deckers had come to the “farewell party.” There, onscreen, he was crossing a hotel corridor, and I thought it really strange that one could pass from a world in which everything ended to another, freed from the laws of gravity, in which you were suspended for all eternity: from that evening on Rue Froidevaux, of which nothing remained except the fading echoes in my memory, to those several seconds captured on film, in which Deckers would cross a hotel corridor until the end of time.

  That night, I had dreamed I was in Jansen’s studio, sitting on the sofa as in the past. I was looking at the photos on the wall, and suddenly I was struck by the resemblance between Colette Laurent and my girlfriend at the time, with whom I’d first met Jansen—someone else of whom I’d long had no news. I convinced myself that she and Colette Laurent were one and the same person. The distance of years had confused matters. They both had chestnut hair and gray eyes. And the same first name.

  I left the studio. It was already dark out and that surprised me. I remembered that it was October or November. I walked toward Denfert-Rochereau. I was supposed to meet up with Colette and a few others in a house near the Parc Montsouris. We got together there every Sunday evening. And, in my dream, I was certain I’d find among the guests that evening Jacques Besse, Eugène Deckers, and Dr. and Mme. de Meyendorff.

  Rue Froidevaux seemed to go on forever, as if the distances stretched to infinity. I was afraid of arriving late. Would they wait for me? The sidewalk was matted with dead leaves and I skirted the wall and the grassy embankment of the Montsouris reservoir, behind which I pictured the still water. A thought stuck with me, vague at first, then becoming clearer: my name was Francis Jansen.

  The day before Jansen left Paris, I had arrived at the studio at noon to put away the photos in the suitcases. I had no reason to expect his sudden departure. He’d told me he wasn’t going anywhere until the end of July. A few days earlier, I’d given him the second copies of the notebook and the inventory of images. At first he’d been hesitant to take them.

  “Do you really think I need this right now?”

  Then he had leafed through the index. He lingered on a page and sometimes uttered a name aloud, as if trying to recall the face that went with it.

  “That’s enough for today …”

  He had snapped the index shut.

  “You’ve done a fine job as a scribe. Congratulations …”

  That last day, when he came into the studio and caught me putting away the photos, he congratulated me again:

  “A true archivist … They should hire you at a museum.”

  We went for lunch at a local restaurant. He was carrying his Rolleiflex. After lunch, we walked along Boulevard Raspail, and he stopped in front of the hotel on the corner of Rue Boissanade, the one that stands alone next to the wall and trees of the American Center.

  He stepped back to the curb and took several shots of the hotel façade.

  “That’s where I lived when I first came to Paris …”

  He recounted that he’d become ill on his first evening here and had kept to his room for a good ten days. He’d been treated by an Austrian refugee who was living in the hotel with his wife, a certain Dr. Tennent.

  “I took a photo of him at the time.”

  I checked it out that same evening. As I’d indexed the photos in chronological order in the red Clairefontaine notebook, this one was mentioned at the top of the list:

  1. Doctor Tennent and his wife. Jardins du Luxembourg. April 1938.

  “But I didn’t yet have a photo of the hotel … You can add it to your list.”

  He asked me to walk with him to the Right Bank, where he had to go pick up “something.” At first he planned to take the metro at Raspail station, but, after seeing on the map that there were too many transfers to get to Opéra, he decided we’d take a taxi.

  Jansen asked the driver to stop on Boulevard des Italiens, in front of the Café de la Paix, and he pointed to the sidewalk tables, saying:

  “Wait for me here. I won’t be long.”

  He headed toward Rue Auber. I paced up and down the boulevard. I hadn’t been in the Café de la Paix since my father used to take me on Sunday afternoons. Out of curiosity, I went in to see whether the automatic scale on which we weighed ourselves back then was still in its place, just before the entrance to the Grand Hôtel. Yes, it was still there. And so I couldn’t resist stepping onto it, sliding a coin in the slot, and waiting for a pink ticket to drop.

  It felt odd to be sitting alone on the sidewalk of the Café de la Paix, where customers were crowding around tables. Was it the June sun, the roar of traffic, the foliage on the trees whose green formed such a striking contrast with the black of the façades, those foreign voices I heard from the neighboring tables? It was as if I, too, were a tourist, lost in a city I didn’t know. I stared fixedly at the pink ticket as if it were the last object capable of attesting to and reassuring me of my identity, but the ticket only increased my malaise. It called to mind a part of my life so distant that I could barely relate it to the present. I ended up wondering if I was really the child who used to come here with his father. Numbness and amnesia gradually overcame me, like sleep on the day when I was hit by a van and they pressed an ether-soaked pad over my face. In another moment, I’d no longer even know who I was, and none of these strangers would be able to tell me. I tried to fight against the numbness, my eyes fixed on the pink ticket that said I weighed 168 lbs.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up but the sun was in my eyes.

  “You look pale …”

  I saw Jansen only as a silhouette. He took a seat across from me.

  “It’s because of the heat,” I stammered. “I think I was feeling faint …”

  He ordered a glass of milk for me and a whiskey for himself.

  “Drink that,” he said. “You’ll feel better afterward.”

  I sipped the ice-cold milk. Yes, little by little, the world around me regained its shapes and colors, as if I were adjusting a pair of binoculars to bring them into focus. Jansen, in front of me, looked at me kindly.

  “Don’t let it faze you, kid. I’ve fallen into my share of black holes too …”

  A breeze was ruffling the leaves on the trees, and their shade felt cool as Jansen and I walked along the main boulevards. We had come to Place de la Concorde. We went into the gardens of the Champs-Elysées. Jansen took pictures with his Rolleiflex, but I scarcely noticed. He cast a furtive eye on the viewfinder, level with his waist. And yet I knew that each of his photos was perfectly framed. One day, when I’d expressed surprise at that feigned carelessness, he’d told me you had to “approach things gently and quietly or they pull away.”

  We had sat on a bench and, still talking, he stood up now and then and pressed the shutter as a dog passed by, or a child, or a ray of sunlight appeared. He had stretched out and crossed his legs and his head was lolling as if he’d dozed off.

  I asked what he was shooting.

  “My shoes.”

  Via Avenue Matignon, we entered Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He pointed out the building that housed the Magnum agency and suggested we have a drink in the café next door where he used to go with Robert Capa, back in the day.
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  We sat at a rear table, and again he ordered a glass of milk for me and a whiskey for himself.

  “This is where I met Colette,” he said suddenly.

  I wanted to ask questions, talk about the few photos of her I’d indexed in the red notebook:

  Colette, 12 Hameau du Danube

  Colette with an umbrella

  Colette, beach at Pampelonne

  Colette, steps on Rue des Cascades

  I finally said, “It’s too bad I didn’t know all of you at the time …”

  He smiled at me.

  “But you were still in diapers …”

  And he pointed to my glass of milk, which I was holding in my hand.

  “Wait a second … Don’t move …”

  He set the Rolleiflex on the table and pressed the shutter. I have that photo here next to me, with all the other ones he took that afternoon. My raised arm, my fingers clutching the glass, are sharply defined against the glare; in the background you can make out the open door of the café, the sidewalk, and the street bathed in summer light—the same light in which we walked, my mother and I, in my memory, alongside Colette Laurent.

  After dinner, I walked him back to the studio. We made a long detour. He was more talkative than usual and for the first time he asked specific questions about my future. He was worried about what my living conditions would be. He mentioned the precariousness of his life in Paris when he was my age. Meeting Robert Capa had saved him; without that, he might not have had the courage to strike out in his field. Moreover, it was Capa who had taught it to him.

  It was already past midnight and we were still chatting on a bench on Avenue du Maine. A pointer trotted alone down the sidewalk, rapidly, and came up to sniff us. It had no collar. It seemed to know Jansen. It followed us to Rue de Froidevaux, first at a distance, then it came up and walked alongside us. We arrived at the studio and Jansen felt in his pockets but he couldn’t find his key. He suddenly looked exhausted. I think he’d had too much to drink. I opened the door with the spare he’d given me.

  In the doorway, he shook my hand and said in a solemn tone:

  “Thank you for everything.”

  He stared at me with a slightly clouded gaze. He closed the door before I had a chance to say that the dog had slipped into the studio behind him.

  The next morning, I phoned at around eleven but there was no answer. I had used our prearranged signal: three rings, hang up, ring again. I decided to go over there to finish putting away the photos.

  As usual, I opened the door with my spare key. The three suitcases had disappeared, along with the picture of Colette Laurent and the one of Jansen with Robert Capa that had been hanging on the wall. On the coffee table, a roll of film to be developed. I took it that afternoon to the shop on Rue Delambre. When I went back to get it a few days later, I discovered in the envelope all the photos Jansen had taken during our walk through Paris.

  I knew that there was no longer any point in waiting for him.

  I searched through the closets upstairs, but there was nothing in them, not a single article of clothing, not even a sock. Someone had removed the sheets and bedclothes, and the mattress was bare. Not one cigarette butt in the ashtrays. No more glasses or bottles of whiskey. I felt like a police inspector looking through the apartment of a man who’d been wanted for a long time, and I told myself it was useless, since there was no proof the man had ever lived here, not even a fingerprint.

  I waited until five o’clock, sitting on the sofa, looking through the red notebook and the index. Apparently, Jansen had taken the second copies of the notebooks. Perhaps Nicole would ring at the door and I’d have to tell her that from now on we’d probably be waiting for Jansen in vain and that centuries from now, an archeologist would find the two of us mummified on the sofa. Rue Froidevaux would become an excavation site. At the corner of the Montparnasse cemetery, they’d find Gil the Mime turned into a statue, and they’d hear his heart beating. And the tape recorder, behind him, would still be playing a poem that he’d recorded in his metallic voice:

  Demons and marvels

  Winds and tides …

  A question suddenly occurred to me: what had become of the pointer that had followed us the night before, the one that had slipped into the studio without Jansen realizing it? Had he taken it with him? Now that I think about it, I wonder whether the dog wasn’t simply his.

  I went back to the studio later, when evening was falling. A final spot of sunlight lingered on the sofa. Between those walls, the heat was stifling. I opened the bay window. I could hear the rustling of the trees and the footfalls of people walking in the street. I was amazed that the roar of traffic had stopped farther over toward Denfert-Rochereau, as if the feeling of absence and emptiness that Jansen left was spreading in concentric circles and Paris was gradually clearing out.

  I wondered why he hadn’t told me he was leaving. But those few signs were indicative of an imminent departure: the photo he’d taken of the hotel on Boulevard Raspail and the detour up to Faubourg Saint-Honoré to show me Magnum’s old headquarters and the café he used to frequent with Robert Capa and Colette Laurent. Yes, he had made, in my company, a final pilgrimage to the places of his youth. At the back of the studio, the darkroom door was ajar. The afternoon when Jansen had developed the pictures of my girlfriend and me, the small light bulb had shone red in the dark. He stood in front of the developing tray with rubber gloves on. He had handed me the negatives. When we went back into the studio, the light of the sun had blinded me.

  I didn’t hold it against him. I even understood him so well … I had noticed in him certain ways of acting and certain character traits that had become familiar. He’d said to me, “Don’t let it faze you, kid. I’ve fallen into my share of black holes too …” I couldn’t predict the future, but thirty years later, when I’d become the same age as Jansen, I wouldn’t answer the telephone either, and I would disappear, as he had, one June evening, in the company of a phantom dog.

  Three years later, on a June evening that strangely enough was the anniversary of his departure, Jansen was very much on my mind. Not because of that anniversary, but because a publisher had just accepted my first book, and in the inner pocket of my jacket I had a letter announcing the news.

  I remembered that at one point on the last evening we’d spent together, Jansen had expressed concern about my future. And today, they’d assured me that my book would soon be published. I had finally emerged from that period of vagueness and uncertainty during which I lived as a fraud. I would have liked it if Jansen had been around to share my relief. I was sitting at a café near Rue Froidevaux, and for an instant I was tempted to go call at the studio, as if Jansen were still there.

  How would he have greeted that first book? I hadn’t respected the instructions of silence he’d given me the day we’d spoken about literature. No doubt he would have deemed it much too indiscreet.

  When he was the same age as I, he was already the author of several hundred photos, some of which composed Sun and Snow.

  That evening, I flipped through Sun and Snow. Jansen had told me he wasn’t responsible for the namby-pamby title, which the Swiss publisher had chosen himself, without asking his opinion.

  As I turned the pages, I felt more and more what Jansen had been trying to communicate, and what he’d gently challenged me to suggest with the word silence. The first two images in the book bore the same caption: At number 140. They depicted one of those clusters of buildings on the outskirts of Paris on a summer’s day. Nobody in the courtyard or in the doorways to the stairs. Not one silhouette in the windows. Jansen had told me that a friend his age had lived there, someone he’d known in the Drancy transit camp. When the Italian consulate had Jansen released, the friend had asked him to go to that address to let his relatives and girlfriend know how he was doing. Jansen had gone to number 140, but he’d found none of the people his friend had mentioned. He’d gone back again after the Liberation, in the spring of 1945. In vain.
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  And so, feeling helpless, he’d taken those photos so that the place where his friend and his friend’s loved ones had lived would at least be preserved on film. But the courtyard, the square, and the deserted buildings under the sun made their absence even more irremediable.

  The next images in the book dated from before the ones of number 140, since they’d been taken when Jansen was a refugee in the Haute-Savoie: expanses of snow, its whiteness contrasting with the blue of the sky. On the slopes were black dots that must have been skiers, a toy-sized ski lift, and the sun beating down on all of it, the same sun as for “number 140,” an indifferent sun. Through that snow and that sun showed an emptiness, an absence.

  Sometimes, Jansen took objects from very close up: plants, a spider’s web, snail shells, flowers, blades of grass with ants bustling among them. One felt that he trained his gaze on something very specific to avoid thinking about anything else. I remembered when we’d sat on the bench, in the gardens of the Champs-Elysées, and he’d photographed his shoes.

  And once again, mountain slopes of an eternal whiteness beneath the sun, the narrow streets and deserted squares of the South of France, several photos all with the same caption: Paris in July—my birth month, when the city seemed abandoned. But Jansen, in order to fight against the impression of emptiness and neglect, had tried to capture an entirely rural aspect of Paris: curtains of trees, canal, cobblestones in the shade of plane trees, the clock tower of Saint-Germain de Charonne, the steps on Rue des Cascades … He was seeking a lost innocence and settings made for enjoyment and ease, but where one could never be happy again.

  He thought a photographer was nothing, that he should blend into the surroundings and become invisible, the better to work and capture—as he said—natural light. One shouldn’t even hear the click of the Rolleiflex. He would have liked to conceal his camera. The death of his friend Robert Capa could in fact be explained, as he saw it, by this desire, the giddiness of blending into the surroundings once and for all.