Young Once

by Patrick Modiano

  PATRICK MODIANO was born in the Boulogne-Billancourt suburb of Paris near the end of the Nazi occupation of France. He studied at the Lycée Henri-IV and the Sorbonne. As a teenager he took geometry lessons with the writer Raymond Queneau, who would play a key role in his development. He has written more than thirty works of fiction, including novels, children’s books, and the screenplay for Louis Malle’s film Lacombe, Lucien. In 2014, Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  DAMION SEARLS has translated many classic twentieth-century writers, including Marcel Proust, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elfriede Jelinek, Christa Wolf, Hans Keilson, and Hermann Hesse. For NYRB Classics, he edited Henry David Thoreau’s The Journal: 1837–1861 and has translated Nescio, Nietzsche, Robert Walser, Alfred Döblin, and André Gide. He is currently writing a book about Hermann Rorschach and the cultural history of the Rorschach test.

  YOUNG ONCE

  PATRICK MODIANO

  Translated from the French by

  DAMION SEARLS

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1981 by Éditions Gallimard

  Translation copyright © 2016 by Damion Searls

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in French as Une jeunesse.

  Cover image: Jeanloup Sieff, Gérard Blain, Paris, 1959; courtesy of the Estate of Jeanloup Sieff

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Modiano, Patrick, 1945– author. | Searls, Damion, translator.

  Title: Young once / Patrick Modiano ; translated by Damion Searls.

  Other titles: Jeunesse. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2016. | Series: New York Review Books Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015039565 (print) | LCCN 2015045712 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590179550 (paperback) | ISBN 9781590179567 (epub)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PQ2673.O3 J4813 2016 (print) | LCC PQ2673.O3 (ebook) | DDC 843/.914—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039565

  ISBN 978-1-59017-956-7

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Dedication

  YOUNG ONCE

  For Rudy

  For Zina

  For Marie

  YOUNG ONCE

  THE CHILDREN are playing in the garden. Soon it will be time for the daily chess game.

  “He’s getting his cast off tomorrow morning,” Odile says.

  She and Louis are sitting on the deck of the chalet and watching from afar as their daughter and son run across the lawn with Viterdo’s three children. Their son is five, with a cast on his left arm, but it doesn’t seem to bother him.

  “How long has it been?” Louis asks.

  “Almost a month.”

  He had slipped off a swing, and it had been almost a week before they realized he had a fracture.

  “I’m going to take my bath,” Odile says.

  She goes upstairs to the second floor. When she gets back, they will start their chess game. He hears the bathwater running.

  On the other side of the road, behind the row of pine trees, the funicular terminal looks like a spa’s little train station. One of the first cable cars built in France, apparently. Louis follows it with his eyes as it slowly climbs the slope of the Foraz, and the vivid red of its cabin cuts into the green of the summery mountainside. The children had dodged around the pines and now they are riding their bikes on the shady roundabout next to the terminal.

  Yesterday, Louis had taken a large wooden plaque off the outside of the chalet, the one on which he had written, in white letters, SUNNY HOME. It lay on the ground behind the French window. It was twelve years ago that they bought the chalet and turned it into a kids’ camp, and they had not known what to call it. Odile wanted a French name—Les Lutins, Les Diablerets—but Louis thought an English name was classier and would attract more customers. They ended up going with Sunny Home.

  He picks up the wooden sign. Sunny Home. He’ll put it away in a drawer soon. He feels relieved. The children’s home, that’s over now. Starting tomorrow, they will have the chalet for themselves. He’ll turn the shed at the far end of the garden into a restaurant and teahouse where people can stop in during the winter, before taking the funicular.

  Darkness rises up, little by little, from the bottom of the valley and the far end of the garden, along with the screams and laughter of the children now playing hide and seek. Tomorrow, June 23, is Odile’s thirty-fifth birthday. And next month it will be his turn: He will be turning thirty-five as well. He’d invited the Viterdos and their children to the chalet for Odile’s birthday, as well as Allard, the old skier who runs a small sports store.

  The red funicular has started down the mountainside and it disappears behind a mass of pine trees, then reappears, following its path at the same calm speed. They will see it climb back up and descend back down until nine p.m.; the last time, it will be nothing but a fat firefly sliding along the face of the Foraz.

  •

  “Don’t be scared, my boy.”

  The doctor patted the child’s cheek. Odile was the one who was nervous. The doctor, with a device spinning as fast as a circular saw used for cutting logs, started to split open the cast where Odile had drawn flowers. And the boy’s arm suddenly appeared, intact. The skin was not dry or pale, as Odile had feared. The boy moved his arm, bent it gently, not really believing it, a watchful smile on his lips.

  “Now you can go break it again,” the doctor had said.

  She had promised him an ice cream before they went back up to the chalet, and they sat down face to face at an outdoor café by the lake. The child chose pistachio-strawberry.

  “Are you glad you don’t have your cast anymore?”

  He didn’t answer. He ate his ice cream, his face serious with concentration.

  She looked at him and wondered if he would remember, later, that cast dotted with flowers. His first memory of childhood? He squinted in the sun. The mist was blowing away on the lake and it was her thirty-fifth birthday. And soon Louis would be thirty-five too. Could anything new happen to them, at thirty-five? She wondered, thinking about the intact skin on the boy’s arm suddenly appearing from under the cast; it was like the arm was what had broken open the hard shell they had encased it in. Does life ever start over at thirty-five? A serious question, which made her smile. She would have to ask Louis. She had the feeling that the answer was no. You reach a zone of total calm and the paddleboat glides all by itself across a lake like the one stretching out before her. And the children grow up. They leave you.

  An eyelash at the corner of her eye was bothering her and she reached into her bag for an empty compact she kept solely for its little round mirror. She couldn’t get the lash, and she scrutinized her face. It hadn’t changed. She had the same face as when she was twenty. The tiny wrinkles at the corners of her mouth hadn’t been there back then, but the rest was the same, yes . . . And Louis had not changed either. He was a little thinner, that’s all . . .

  “Happy birthday, Mama.”

  He said it stumbling over the words, but with a certain pride. She hugged him. How strange it would be if children knew their parents the way they were before the chi
ldren were born, when they were not yet parents but simply themselves. Her childhood, with her grandmother in Paris, on rue Charles-Cros, where the bus lines started. A little farther on, the gray building of the Tourelles swimming pool, the movie theater, the slope of boulevard Sérurier. With a little imagination, that hill on misty, sunny mornings was a steep cliffside road, leading down to the ocean.

  “We have to go home now.”

  Driving the car on the road up to the chalet, her son sitting next to her, Odile hummed a tune, something or other, without thinking about it. Before long, she realized that it was the first bars of an operetta she had found, to her great surprise, at a used-record store in Geneva: Hawaii Rose . . .

  •

  They are sitting on the green bench in front of the funicular terminal, and their son is riding his bicycle around the roundabout. It has training wheels. Odile is stretched out with her head on Louis’s knee, reading a movie magazine.

  The child moves through the patches of sunlight one by one, then restarts what he calls his “grand tour.” He stops every so often to pick up a pinecone. The cable-car operator is smoking a cigarette in the doorway to the building, and he looks like a stationmaster with his blue cap and uniform.

  “So, how’s it going?” Louis says.

  “Not many customers today.”

  It didn’t matter. Even empty, the red funicular would leave on schedule. That was the rule.

  “Even though it’s sunny,” the operator says.

  “It’s not holiday time yet,” Louis says. “Just wait, in two weeks . . .”

  The child circles the roundabout and pedals harder and harder. Odile has put on her sunglasses and is flipping through the magazine, holding the pages tight because of the wind.

  •

  In his sleep, he hears the children’s shouts getting closer and farther away and closer again, and for him this corresponds to the intensities of the different lights, the plays of shadow and sunlight. But he always has the same dream. He is sitting in an empty velodrome, in a seat at the very top, watching his father clutch the handlebars and cycle slowly around the track.

  Someone says his name and he opens his eyes. His daughter is standing in front of him, smiling at him. She is almost as tall as Odile.

  “Papa . . . The guests are here.”

  She is wearing a red dress and that surprises Louis. She is thirteen years old. He is just coming out of his dream and, still drowsy, he is surprised that his daughter could be so tall.

  “Papa . . .”

  She gives him a reproachful smile, takes him by the hand, and tries to pull him off the sofa. Louis resists. After a moment he lets himself be dragged upright, stands up, and kisses her on the forehead. He goes out onto the deck. It’s not dark yet and he sees, through the row of pine trees, a group coming up to the chalet. He recognizes Allard’s deep voice and Martine Viterdo’s laugh. Over there, the red cable car glides slowly along the slope of the Foraz, a ladybug in the grass.

  •

  All the lights in the dining room have been turned off. Louis, Odile, Viterdo and his wife, Allard, and the children are waiting around the table. Louis’s daughter comes out of the kitchen carrying the cake, with eight candles shining on it: three for the decades, five for the years. She walks toward them and they sing, in English: “Happy Birthday to you . . .”

  She puts the tray down in the middle of the table. Everyone takes turns giving Odile a kiss.

  “Well,” Viterdo says, “what’s it like being thirty-five?”

  “I’m almost old enough to be a grandmother,” Odile answers.

  “Don’t be silly, Odile.”

  “You have to blow out the candles, Mama.”

  Odile leans over the cake and blows.

  “First try!”

  They clap and someone turns the lights back on.

  “A song! A song!”

  “Odile will now sing for you ‘La Chanson des rues,’ ” Louis says.

  “No, no. No way.”

  She cuts the cake. The children have left the table and all five of them are standing in a group at the edge of the deck. Odile and Louis bring them each a piece of cake on a little napkin.

  “They won’t want to go to sleep,” says Martine, Viterdo’s wife.

  “It doesn’t matter. This is a special day,” Allard says in his deep voice. “You don’t turn thirty-five every day.”

  Viterdo checks his watch.

  “I think we have to go, Louis. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.”

  He has to take the night train to Paris, the 11:03, and Louis has offered to drive him to the station.

  “Let’s go,” Louis says.

  Allard, Viterdo’s wife, and Odile are sitting on the deck, chatting. Allard’s voice dominates the conversation. The night is warm and there’s the sound of a storm brewing, far away.

  Viterdo, standing in the middle of the living room, opens his black briefcase. He seems to be checking that he hasn’t forgotten anything in the rush. The children are bustling on the stairs and the noise of their hurried footsteps fades as they cross the large upstairs rooms. Odile has left the deck and rejoined Louis just when he is about to follow Viterdo out of the chalet.

  “Happy birthday,” Louis says.

  “Oh, enough already,” Odile says.

  “What’s it like being thirty-five?”

  She shakes him by the shoulder. “Enough already. It’ll be your turn soon too.”

  He hugs her to him and they burst out laughing. This is the first time in their life that they are celebrating one of their birthdays. It’s a silly thing to do, but maybe the children will like it . . .

  •

  Viterdo puts his bag and black briefcase on the seat in back, then gets in and sits next to Louis.

  “I really am sorry, Louis.”

  “It’s nothing. Really. We’ll be at the station in five minutes.”

  Louis pulls out slowly. After a moment, he turns off the engine and the car travels down the straight little road in silence.

  “When are you coming back?” Louis asks.

  “Next weekend. I want to spend August here with Martine and the kids. You get to stay here in the mountains all year.”

  “I don’t think I could live in Paris,” Louis says.

  He grabs the knob on the radio and turns it on, the way he always does when he’s driving.

  “How long have you lived here?” Viterdo asks.

  “Thirteen years.”

  “It’s barely six years since we bought our place . . .”

  “I feel like you’ve been here longer.”

  Viterdo is the same age as Louis. He works at an import-export business in Paris. Every year, at Christmas and Easter, he and Martine come to go skiing with their three children, whom they often leave with Odile and Louis so that they can play with the other kids at Sunny Home.

  “So, you’re done with the home?”

  “We’re done,” Louis says with a smile. “Now we’ll have the chalet all to ourselves. The kids will be able to roller skate in the rooms.”

  “And you, what are you going to do now?”

  “Maybe start a restaurant and teahouse for the cable-car people, with Allard.”

  “You’re doing the right thing, really,” Viterdo says. “I wish I could drop everything and live out here too.”

  The first turn in the road. To the left, the wall surrounding the Hotel Royal. Louis restarts the car’s engine.

  “The kids are definitely happier here than they’d be in Paris,” he says. “What I want is for my son to become a ski instructor.”

  “Really? What about your daughter?”

  “Oh, you never know with girls.”

  He has rolled down the window. The storm seems to be moving in.

  “Did you ever live in Paris?” Viterdo asks.

  “Yes. It was a long time ago.”

  He stops the car outside the station, opens the door, and picks up Viterdo’s bags.

  �
��Louis, please.”

  They cross the small, empty station hall, lit by fluorescent lights. Viterdo slips his ticket into the machine that stamps it.

  “They’re more and more complicated, these machines,” Louis says. “Luckily, I don’t travel anymore.”

  The train is already in the station.

  “Bye, Louis. See you Friday.”

  Louis walks him to the platform and helps him stow his bag and black briefcase in the sleeping-car compartment. Viterdo, smiling, opens the window and leans out.

  “Till Friday, then. I’m leaving Martine and the children in your hands. Be strict . . .”

  “Very strict, same as always.”

  Crossing the station hall again, Louis notices a candy machine next to the closed ticket counters. He puts two coins into the slot. Something falls down, wrapped in red and gold paper—one of those chocolates called rochers, rocks. Huh, they still have those . . . Odile used to buy them all the time at the bakery on rue Caulaincourt. This would be his birthday present for her.

  On the other side of the square, behind the café windows, several motionless silhouettes face a TV screen. The voice of a singer reaches him. Only the voice, a little husky, he can’t understand the words. A warm wind starts blowing. On the road back, the first drops of rain . . .

  •

  It rained for days on end in Saint-Lô, that fall fifteen years ago, making large puddles in the barracks yard. He had accidentally stepped in the middle of one and felt an icy shackle grip his ankles.

  His tin suitcase in his hand, he saluted the orderly. When he reached the street corner, he could not help turning around to look back at this brownish building that would never again be any part of his life.

  His civilian clothes—a gray flannel suit—pinched his armpits and were too tight around his thighs. He would need a winter coat and, especially, shoes. Yes. Shoes with thick crepe soles.

  Brossier had said they should meet at the Café du Balcon, around seven. The thought suddenly came to him that he had known Brossier for two months; Brossier was lying to him when he’d said he was only passing through Saint-Lô. Why had he extended his stay here, if his “business” was calling him back to Paris?