The Black Notebook

by Patrick Modiano

  “Jean, I want to ask you something.”

  We were walking by the square set back from the quay, in the middle of which sat tables and tubs of greenery defining the limits of an outdoor café. That evening, they had put parasols on the tables. A summer’s night in a little port town in the Midi. Murmurs of conversation.

  “Jean, what would you say if I’d done something really serious?”

  I have to confess that the question did not alarm me. Perhaps because of her casual tone, as one might recite song lyrics or lines of a poem. And because of her “Jean, what would you say,” it was in fact a line of verse that occurred to me: “Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?”

  “What would you say if I’d murdered somebody?”

  I thought she was joking, or that she’d asked because of the crime novels she often read. In fact, they were all she read. Maybe in one of those novels, a woman asked her boyfriend the same question.

  “What would I say? Nothing.”

  Still today, I would give the same answer. Do we have the right to judge the people we love? If we love them, it’s for a reason, and that reason prevents us from judging them—doesn’t it?

  “Well . . . Not murdered, exactly . . . More like an accident . . .”

  “That’s comforting.”

  She seemed disappointed by my response, and it was only years later that I recognized its glibness and poor unintentional humor.

  “Yes . . . an accident . . . It went off by itself . . .”

  “Life’s full of stray bullets,” I said.

  I had immediately thought of gunshots. And indeed, she answered:

  “That’s right . . . stray bullets.”

  I burst out laughing. She flashed me a look full of reproach. Then she squeezed my arm.

  “Let’s not talk about these depressing things . . . I had a bad dream last night . . . I dreamed I was in an apartment and I shot a man in self-defense . . . A horrible man with heavy eyelids . . .”

  “Heavy eyelids?”

  “That’s right.”

  She was probably still lost in her dream. But it didn’t worry me. I had often had the same experience: certain dreams—or rather, certain nightmares—can stick with you all the next day. They blend in with your most ordinary movements, and even if you’re sitting with friends at an outdoor café table in the sun, fragments of them still pursue you and adhere to your real life, like a kind of echo or static that you can’t clear away. Sometimes that confusion is due to lack of sleep. I felt like telling her as much, to reassure her. We had come as far as Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. In front of the American bookshop, benches and chairs had been arranged as if at a café terrace, and about a dozen people were sitting there, listening to some jazz leaking from the shop.

  “We should go sit with them,” I said. “It’ll take your mind off your bad dream.”

  “You think so?”

  But we kept on walking, I don’t remember which way. I recall silent avenues over which the leaves of the plane trees formed a vault, the occasional lit window in the building façades, and the Belfort lion keeping watch, eyes fixed toward the south. She had come out of her dream. We sat on the steep flight of steps leading to Rue de l’Aude. I heard the nearby sound of running water. She leaned her face close to mine.

  “You shouldn’t pay any attention to what I said a little while ago . . . Nothing has changed . . . It’s just like before . . .”

  That summer night, the ripple of a waterfall or fountain, the long stairway cut into the high retaining wall, from which we looked out over the treetops . . . Everything was calm, and I was certain that before us stretched lines vanishing into the future.

  One doesn’t often return to the southern part of Paris. The area ended up becoming an internal, imaginary landscape, and it seems extraordinary that names like Tombe-Issoire, Glacière, Montsouris, or Château de la Reine Blanche can exist in reality, spelled out on city maps. I’ve never gone back to Rue de l’Aude. Except in my dreams. And then I see it in different seasons. From the windows of my old room it is covered in snow, but if I approach it from the avenue by the steep flight of steps, it’s always summertime.

  On the other hand, I have driven many times along the Quai Henri-IV to go to the Gare de Lyon. And each time, I’ve felt a pang in my heart and a kind of disquiet. Once, when I had taken a taxi from the station, I told the driver to stop in front of number 46-bis, pretending I had to pick someone up. I stared at the carriage entrance. I had pushed it open at that same hour, one July evening. And this evening was also in July. I tried to count the years. After a while, the driver asked:

  “You really think the person’s coming?”

  I asked him to wait a moment and stepped out of the cab. When I reached the entrance, I noticed a keypad to my right: this hadn’t been there before. I pressed four buttons at random, plus the letter D. The door remained locked. I got back in the cab.

  “Forgot the code, eh?” said the driver. “Should we keep waiting?”

  “No.”

  Sometimes, in my dreams, I know the code and don’t need to push the door. No sooner have I pressed the letter D than it automatically swings open and shuts behind me. The wide entrance hall is bathed in daylight filtering through a huge window at the back. I find myself in front of the other door, the one to the ground-floor apartment, the door made of heavy, light-colored wood that a woman named Mme Dorme was supposed to open for me that July evening when I was with Dannie. I pause a moment before ringing. Sunlight dapples the door. I feel carefree, liberated from remorse or some obscure guilt. It will be like before; or rather, there will never have been a before or after in our lives, no “something serious,” no break, no handicap, no original sin—I struggle to find the right words—no weight that we drag around despite our youth and heedlessness. I am about to ring, and the sound will be as crystalline as on that first evening. The two leaves of the door will open with the same languid movement as the carriage entrance, and a blond woman of about fifty, elegantly dressed and with regular features, will say, “Dannie is expecting you in the salon.”

  Is this woman Mme Dorme? Every time, I wake up asking myself that question, but there’s never an answer. She is mentioned in Langlais’s file, which provides only a few insignificant details. No photo of her: “. . . alias Mme Dorme, first associated with Paul Milani at ‘number 4’ Rue de Douai . . . Manageress of Buffet 48 and of Étoile-Iéna . . . Said to have purchased several racehorses fifteen years ago . . . Departure for Switzerland, date unknown . . .” Faceless, like the dead body they took away in a car parked in front of the building. It was about one in the morning, according to the deposition by the concierge at 46-bis. He personally opened the carriage entrance to let them through. There were four of them. He, the concierge, had no idea the man was dead; one of the people carrying him out said only that he’d taken ill and they were bringing him to Lariboisière Hospital. Why Lariboisière? It was far away, on the other side of town. In reality, according to the information Langlais had pieced together, they had driven the corpse “home” so that he could officially die his peaceful death, without anyone ever being wise to the fact that it had happened in a ground-floor apartment at 46-bis Quai Henri-IV. For several months the concierge had noticed many people coming and going from that apartment, starting at about nine p.m. and continuing all night long. He often heard music in there, he said, but that night there wasn’t a sound. You must have been there with the one they call “the victim”—they never give the man’s name. And yet, at the bottom of a page, one can see that the name had been typed in, then later erased. Two letters are still barely visible: an S and a V. So that night, you were in the apartment with the unknown man, a few other people—a “small gathering,” the report states—and the woman called Mme Dorme. The concierge heard two gunshots, just before midnight. After about ten minutes, he saw two men and two women leaving the apartment, followed by “a young lady” whom he describes in rather precise detail: she had been a
frequent visitor to the apartment over the past several months, he had spoken with her several times, and she regularly picked up mail addressed to her under the name Mireille Sampierry. That was you. The four others arrived roughly an hour later to carry that nameless, faceless man out to the car parked in front of the building. One individual present that evening—a certain Jean Terrail—testified that it was you who fired the gun, but that the weapon belonged to the stranger, and he had threatened you with it “brutally and obscenely.” No doubt he had been drinking. He’s no longer around to say. It’s as if he had never existed. We can suppose that you managed to wrest the gun away from him, that you fired, or else that the shots “went off by themselves” because you made too sudden a movement. Two stray bullets? They found the slugs in a room of the apartment in the course of their investigation. But who let them in? Mme Dorme? Not much about you in the file. You were never born in Casablanca, as you had told me one evening when we were talking about Aghamouri and the others at the Unic Hôtel who had “close ties” with Morocco, but quite simply in Paris during the war, two years before me. Born of an unknown father and Andrée Lydia Roger, at 7 Rue Narcisse-Diaz in the sixteenth arrondissement. Mirabeau Clinic. But sometime after the war, they report, your mother, Andrée Lydia Roger, was living at 16 Rue Vitruve in the twentieth. Why that detail, and why the sudden plunge from the affluent sixteenth arrondissement to the squalid Charonne district? Perhaps only you could have explained. There is no mention of your brother Pierre, whom you often talked about. They know that you had lived on Rue Blanche under the name Mireille Sampierry, but they don’t say why you used that name. No reference to your room at the Cité Universitaire or the American Pavilion. Or to Avenue Victor-Hugo. And yet, I often accompanied you there and waited for you behind the building with two exits. And you always returned with a wad of cash, and I wondered who had given it to you—but that, too, was something they hadn’t noticed. Nothing about the little apartment on Avenue Félix-Faure, either, or La Barberie. They know that you took a room at the Unic Hôtel, according to information provided by “Davin,” but they did not seem in much of a hurry to question you, which would have required only a short wait in the lobby, or a simple telephone call from “Davin” to alert them to your presence. They must have dropped the investigation without much ado, and in any case, by the time I was summoned by Langlais, you had already “disappeared.” It’s down on paper. Disappeared like Mme Dorme, whom they were unable to track down in Switzerland, assuming they even tried.

  I don’t know whether they botched the case or whether the information they keep in their archives on thousands upon thousands of people is always this incomplete, but I confess I was underwhelmed. Until then, I’d always believed they “probed minds and hearts,” that their files contained the most minute details of our lives, all of our paltry secrets, and that we were at the mercy of their silence. But what do they really know about the two of us, about you, apart from those stray bullets and that phantom corpse? In the deposition they made me sign beneath the formula “seen and approved,” I say almost nothing about you. Or about myself. I told them that we’d met not long before, through a Moroccan student at the Cité Universitaire, and that you were hoping to enroll at the Censier branch of the university. And that we saw each other for barely three months in the Latin Quarter and around Montparnasse, amid the earnest students and old painters with curly hair and velvet jackets who frequented the area. We went to the movies. And to bookstores. I even specified that we took long walks around Paris and in the Bois de Boulogne. As I answered those questions in that office on the Quai de Gesvres, I heard the clacking of the typewriter. Langlais was typing it up himself, with two fingers. Yes, we also went to the cafés on Boul’Mich, and, not having much money, we sometimes ate in the student cafeteria at the Cité Universitaire. And since he had asked how I spent my free time, wanting, he said, to “get a better sense of our personalities,” I ended up giving him other details: we frequented the cinematheque on Rue d’Ulm and were planning to sign up for the Jeunesses Musicales. When he asked about Aghamouri and the Unic Hôtel, I felt I was on slippery ground. We had met Aghamouri at the Cité Universitaire cafeteria. I honestly thought he was just another student. Moreover, I had gone to pick him up after his classes at Censier several times. No, I would never have guessed he worked for the “Moroccan secret service.” But, anyway, that was none of our business. And the Unic Hôtel? No, no, it wasn’t Aghamouri who had brought us there. I had heard they let you go upstairs at the Unic even if you were a minor, which I was. That’s why we took a room there from time to time, my girlfriend and I. I noticed that Langlais did not type that answer, and that all my lies were apparently of little interest to him.

  “So, if I understand you correctly, Ghali Aghamouri never introduced you and your girlfriend to these individuals: Duwelz, Marciano, Chastagnier, and Georges B., alias Rochard?”

  “No,” I said.

  While pecking at the keys with his two index fingers, he recited the sentence in my stead: “The aforementioned Ghali Aghamouri never introduced me to Duwelz, Marciano, Chastagnier, and Rochard. My girlfriend and I merely saw them in the lobby of the hotel.” Then he smiled at me and shrugged. Perhaps he thought the same as I did: that all these petty details did not especially concern us. Pretty soon, they would no longer matter in our lives. He remained pensive for a long while, his arms folded behind his typewriter, head lowered, and I thought he had forgotten me. And, in a gentle voice, without looking at me, he said, “Did you know your girlfriend did time in La Petite-Roquette two years ago?” Then he smiled at me again. I felt a pang in my heart. “It wasn’t all that serious . . . She was there for eight months . . .” And he handed me a sheet of paper that I forced myself to read over very quickly, because he was holding it between his thumb and index finger, and I was afraid he would snatch it back. Lines and words danced before my eyes: “. . . shoplifting in several luxury department stores . . . was picked up on Avenue Victor-Hugo carrying a crocodile-skin handbag . . . ‘I would go into a store without a handbag. Once inside, I’d choose one and walk out with it . . . same for the coats.’ ”

  He put the sheet on his desk without giving me time to finish. He seemed embarrassed to have shown me such a document. “It wasn’t all that serious,” he repeated. “Kid stuff, really . . . kleptomania . . . You know what they say about kleptomania?” I was amazed that the interrogation had suddenly taken such an ordinary turn, almost like a friendly chat. “A lack of affection. You steal what nobody ever gave you. Was she lacking affection?” He stared at me with his large blue eyes, and I had the impression that he was trying to read my thoughts, and succeeding.

  “Now, of course, she’s mixed up in something much more serious . . . It happened three months ago . . . Just before you met her . . . There was a homicide.”

  I must have gone very pale, since the blue eyes that he’d trained on me took on an expression of concern. He seemed to be studying me.

  “Of course, we could always consider this an accident . . . two stray bullets . . .”

  With a weary movement, he rolled a blank sheet into his typewriter and asked, “Did your girlfriend ever talk to you about an evening that took place last September in an apartment on 46-bis Quai Henri-IV in Paris?”

  I answered in the negative, and once again I heard the clacking of the typewriter. Then another question: “Did your girlfriend ever explain to you why she was always changing her name?” I had not known this detail, but even if I had, I wouldn’t have been overly surprised. I, too, had changed my forename and falsified my birth date to make myself older, of legal age. Anyway, I knew her only as Dannie. As he typed my answer, I spelled out the name, recalling my mistake when we’d first met.

  “Have you had any word from her since she disappeared, and do you have any idea of her current whereabouts?”

  That question made me so sad that I couldn’t speak. He answered for me, pecking at the typewriter keys with his two fingers: “I have
had no word from my girlfriend since she disappeared, and I assume she went abroad . . .”

  He interrupted himself:

  “Did she ever mention a Mme Dorme to you?”

  “No.”

  He thought for a moment, then continued aloud, still typing with two fingers:

  “. . . that she went abroad, probably in the company of the above-mentioned Hélène Méreux, alias Mme Dorme.”

  He heaved a sigh, as if he had just rid himself of a burdensome chore. He handed me the sheet.

  “Sign there.”

  I, too, was relieved to be done with this.

  “It’s a routine investigation that’s been dragging on for months,” he said, as if to reassure me. “They’ll almost certainly bury the case . . . The victim supposedly died of natural causes in his home. I hope there won’t be any fallout for you. But you never know . . .”

  I tried to find a few friendly words before taking my leave.

  “You type up the depositions?” I asked. “I was under the impression they were all taken down by hand, back in the day.”

  “That’s right, they were. And most of the inspectors at the time had beautiful handwriting. And they composed their reports in flawless French.”

  He led me down the hall and we descended the stairs together. Before parting company, at the doorway that opened onto the quay, he said:

  “I gather you’ve started writing as well. By hand?”

  “Yes. By hand.”

  They tore down La Petite-Roquette. In its place stretches a public park. When I was about twenty, I often used to visit a certain Adolfo Kaminsky, a photographer who lived in one of the tall buildings across the street. His windows overlooked the hexagonal prison with its six turrets. It was the same period as when you were incarcerated there, but I didn’t know that at the time. The other night, I waited at the front gate of the prison, opposite Kaminsky’s building, and they let me in. They led me to the visiting room. They had me sit before a glass screen, and you were sitting on the other side. I was talking to you and you seemed to understand me, but although you moved your lips, pressed your forehead against the glass, I couldn’t hear your voice. I asked you questions: “Who was Mme Dorme? The phantom corpse from Quai Henri-IV? And the person you often went to see in the building with two exits while I waited?” From the movement of your lips, I could see that you were trying to answer, but the glass between us muffled your voice. The silence of an aquarium.