Young Once

by Patrick Modiano

  He would fall silent once again and, as they walked back down the street in the other direction, she would have the feeling that he had suddenly lost interest in her, maybe even forgotten she was there. She would ask him a timid question about the record but he wouldn’t answer. He would stare straight ahead: “It’s a hard business . . . very hard.”

  He would say it so indifferently that she would wonder if this business still interested him at all.

  They would arrive back at the door to number 21. Just before entering the building, he would make a plan to see her that evening.

  “See you soon, Odile.”

  She would linger a few seconds, hesitating, wanting to go upstairs and surprise him again, like the time when the tape was spinning in the tape player. Maybe he spent his afternoons like that, watching black bands of tape unspool in silence.

  •

  The hotel Brossier had chosen for him, before leaving again for another “business trip,” was located at the far end of the fifteenth arrondissement, on rue de Langeac. One room, with bath; it had a brown wood bed and a piece of paper on the wall with mauve flowers painted on it. A woman of uncertain age, with short hair, brought him up a plate of breakfast at around nine o’clock. He ate every bit, even the sugar cubes and whatever was left of the jam after spreading the rest of it on his bread. During the day, he might order a sandwich at a café counter. He had calculated that with the hundred and fifty francs Brossier had loaned him, he would last more than a week this way. By that time, Brossier would surely be back from his “business trip” and would introduce him—as he had promised—to “the important friend of mine who will give you a job.”

  Ever since the interminable days he had spent in the barracks infirmary, he’d had the habit of listening to his transistor radio in its green leather case. Lying down, looking at the ceiling, he would think about the future, or in other words about nothing, while listening to the news bulletins, songs, and quiz shows, one after the other. He smoked a cigarette from time to time but tried to make the pack last, because they were expensive, these cigarettes. English, they came in metal boxes. The others had made fun of him for it back in the barracks, but he didn’t like brown tobacco.

  At the end of the afternoon, he would leave the hotel with his room key in his pocket, after casting a furtive glance at the glass door to reception. The bald man with a tanned face was playing chess; all he could see of the man’s opponent was his back. Outside, he turned onto rue de la Croix-Nivert. The restaurant was far uphill, and often, along the way, he would stop at Saint-Lambert Square. There, on a bench, he would wait until dinnertime, smoking a cigarette. Brossier had given him an old gabardine coat and a tweed jacket, which came in handy: Winter that year started early and very cold, and then, with the snow, the temperature dropped even further.

  The restaurant looked a bit like a dining hall because of the large tables for eight or ten, each with a label stating the name of the waiter or waitress responsible for it. He would sit at the “Gisèle” table. For nine francs, he would get an appetizer, a main dish of meat and vegetables, a dessert, and as much table wine as he wanted. A fresco ran around the walls, showing a Savoy landscape—the province where the restaurant’s owner was from.

  He would exchange a few polite words with the people next to him, mostly men, some of them locals, others taxi drivers. He’d have a coffee, happy to linger in the midst of all these people, in the smoke and the kitchen smells that permeated their clothes. Rue de la Croix-Nivert. At night, he would walk all the way to boulevard de Grenelle.

  At the intersection, under the elevated Métro bridge, music from a loudspeaker would be smothered by the din of bumper cars. He would stop for a moment beside the track, to watch the poles sliding along the ceiling, leaving a trail of sparks, and the pink, apple green, and purple cars. Then he would keep walking, along the median, down to the Seine.

  Later, when Roland de Bejardy told him about his father, he remembered the constriction in his heart every time he passed the stairs to the Métro station before coming out onto the quai. To the left, there were new apartment buildings on the site of the old Winter Stadium, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where he knew his father had competed in cycling races. And on the nights when he was working in Bejardy’s office and looking through old bound issues of sports magazines to pass the time, gluing the articles that mentioned his father’s name among the other Vel’ d’Hiv racers into an album, he would see himself standing alone, in front of the apartment buildings that had replaced the velodrome, with the clatter of the Métro over his head and the feeling of being nothing more than a speck of dust in the dust of boulevard de Grenelle. And yet, there was the presence of something in the air.

  •

  Bellune’s gaze, as he stood at the window, rested on her the moment she crossed the street and stayed on her for several seconds. Then she disappeared into the crowds of the Champs-Élysées.

  She walked down the avenue and, since it was starting to rain, stepped under the Arcades du Lido. A woman leaving a store jostled her; farther on, she passed a man who smiled at her. He turned around, followed her, and approached her when she left the gallery.

  “Are you alone? Do you want to come have a drink with me?”

  She immediately looked away and hurried down the street. The man tried to catch up to her but stopped under the entrance to the Lido. She walked farther, and he didn’t let her out of his sight, as though he had made a bet he could keep her in sight for as long as possible. Small groups of people came out of a movie theater. He could still see her chestnut-brown hair and the back of her raincoat, and before long she had blended in with the others.

  She went into the Sinfonia. At that time of day, there were lots of customers. She slipped to the back of the store. She chose a record and gave it to the salesman so he could let her listen to it. She waited for one of the booths to be free and sat down, putting the little headphones over her ears. A silence like cotton wool. She forgot the hustle and bustle around her. Now she lets the singer’s voice envelop her, and she closes her eyes. She dreams that one day she will no longer walk around in this crowd, in this suffocating racket. One day, she will burst through this screen of noise and indifference and be nothing but a voice, a clear voice, set free, like the one she is listening to at this moment.

  •

  At the Iéna Métro exit, she walked down the street to the Seine along the Trocadéro gardens. Bellune lived a little farther down, on one of the streets perpendicular to the Quai de Passy.

  The apartment, on the top floor, had a deck upstairs from which you could see the roofs of the neighborhood, the Seine, and the Eiffel Tower. Bellune had arranged chairs and a table along the edge of the deck, by a white banister like a ship’s railing.

  The living-room windows looked out onto the street and the furniture consisted of a long table, a leather armchair, and an upright piano. A hallway led to Bellune’s room. On the left wall of the hall, there was a little poster the size of a playbill, on which it said:

  HAWAII ROSE

  BY

  GEORG BLUENE

  with

  GUSTI HORBER

  AND

  OSCAR HAWELKA

  The letters of the title were interwoven with garlands of roses. Above the title was a medallion containing a photograph of a dark and handsome young man, in which she recognized Bellune.

  “Is that you?”

  He didn’t answer. The next day, they were eating dinner in the restaurant on Square de l’Alboni—they always had dinner in a neighborhood restaurant, as if Bellune was afraid to stray too far from where he lived—and he gave her a partial explanation. At twenty-three, when he still lived in Austria, he had written the music for that operetta, a huge success in Vienna, where he was born, and then in Berlin too. But as bad luck would have it, the launch of his career coincided with the Nazis’ arrival in power. A few years later, he’d had to leave Austria for France, and he had never written music again. He made do with
working in radio and then for the record company. He described it all indifferently, as though it had happened to someone other than him.

  After dinner, he would sometimes take her to a club where amateurs were performing. Bellune would be disappointed by the acts but, to satisfy his conscience, he would stay to the end. One night, at a place empty of customers near the Sacré-Coeur—on rue du Chevalier-de-la-Barre, to be exact: the street had an intriguing name—the show was performed for just the two of them. Under dim lights, a singer with bleached-blond hair wearing a sky-blue suit was throttling his electric guitar while bobbing his head up and down. Bellune, impassive, kept his eyes fixed on him. Then a little brunette in a white lace dress started to sing a lullaby. Between each number, a presenter, with the air of an absentminded street vendor, tossed out a few witty remarks. A tall girl with a bulging forehead, her face and bust like the figurehead of a ship, interpreted some sea shanties. And then it was a chubby, grinning woman’s turn; she performed a string of long-winded jokes. The light turned orange, opal, turquoise, and Bellune congratulated the artists. The evening made a deep impression on Odile.

  It must have been from watching him surreptitiously under the lights, and finding him mysterious, even handsome, like the young man in the medallion, the one who had written, in Vienna, the music for Hawaii Rose.

  •

  She ended up wondering what would happen to her without him and feeling lost whenever he was not by her side.

  One night, when she was going to Bellune’s apartment later than usual, policemen were stopping cars and checking drivers’ and passengers’ IDs. She saw them from a distance but didn’t dare tell the taxi driver to let her out so she could avoid them.

  At a uniformed man’s gesture, the taxi pulled over to the sidewalk. She rummaged in her bag for her passport and handed it through the lowered window.

  “You’re a minor . . .”

  The agent made a sign for her to get out. She paid the fare, and the taxi driver indifferently handed back her change, without even turning around.

  The police van was parked a little farther away, in the side alley off boulevard Berthier. They pushed her inside.

  “A minor.”

  “How old?”

  “Nineteen.”

  Inside, there were two men in uniform and a fat blond man in civilian clothes. He examined her passport.

  “Do you live with your parents?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a student?”

  “No.”

  The door slammed shut; the driver turned the van around and took boulevard Berthier. She was wedged between the two uniformed cops. The fat blond man, sitting on the bench across from her, looked at her and casually waved her passport back and forth like a fan.

  “What are you doing out at this hour?”

  She didn’t answer. Anyway, he had asked the question in a tired voice, purely for form’s sake. He did not seem interested in the answer.

  “Stop on rue Le Châtelier a second,” he told the driver.

  He slipped the passport into his jacket pocket. The police van made a right turn into a little street, slowed, and stopped.

  The fat blond stood up and got out. Since he didn’t shut the van door behind him, she saw him go into one of the buildings through a glass and wrought-iron door. On the wall, a lit sign said: GOURGAUD RESIDENCE.

  For a brief moment she thought about trying to escape. One of the uniformed policemen had gotten out of the van too and was pacing up and down the sidewalk. The other was sitting on the bench across from her and had closed his eyes. But how could she get her passport back? The cop on the sidewalk would stop her anyway.

  Suddenly she felt tired. The two windows on the ground floor of the Gourgaud Residence were lit and she could see through the left one a green plant whose large leaves stuck to the window like suction cups.

  “You want a cigarette?”

  The cop held out his packet. She said no.

  “Do you think they’ll keep me here a long time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He had shrugged his shoulders. He was young, twenty-five at most, and seemed tired. He sucked on his cigarette in a sly, shifty way, holding it pinched it between his thumb and index finger.

  The fat blond came out of the Gourgaud Residence with another man, very tall, with a cane. The cop in uniform who was pacing outside climbed back into the van at once, as though he had to leave them alone together, and sat down next to her. The two men on the sidewalk were talking in very loud voices and occasionally burst out laughing. She could hear scraps of their conversation. It was about someone named Paul.

  They continued their discussion, sometimes drifting away from the van, and she wondered every time if they were going to come back. Maybe they had forgotten about her? The two policemen, for their part, dozed off. The fat blond man and the other man came back to the van again, talking very loud.

  She thought it would go on all night and that she should go to sleep like the two cops. But the blond man leaned in through the van door.

  “You can get out.”

  The other man was standing a few feet away, leaning on his cane.

  “I’m not going to give you back your passport now. You’ll have to come get it tomorrow, at two o’clock. Understand?”

  He told her the address of the police station in the seventeenth arrondissement.

  She walked straight ahead, without daring to turn around, sure that the two men were staring at her back. When she reached avenue de Villiers, she heard the sound of the police van’s engine as it hurtled past her.

  A café was still open at place de la Porte-Champerret and she wanted to phone Bellune and tell him everything, but she didn’t have the courage to ask the cashier for a token.

  A gap in the line of buildings: boulevard Bineau. She was at a flat open area at the edge of the city.

  All it would take would be to walk down the boulevard, through the gap, toward Neuilly, and it would be like pulling herself up out of a swamp and reaching the open air.

  But she went left, crossed the courtyard of the large apartment complex, and walked up the stairs. In her room, she stretched out on the bed and fell asleep at once, without even getting undressed or turning the bedside lamp off.

  •

  Louis woke up with a start. Someone was knocking on the door to his room very loudly.

  “Rise and shine! It’s Brossier. I’ll wait downstairs.”

  He got dressed quickly and went downstairs without even combing his hair. Brossier was leaning on the front desk.

  “Let me take you to breakfast.”

  It was still dark out. Barely seven o’clock. They walked into a café on rue de Vaugirard, where the waiter was just finishing putting the chairs on the floor around the tables.

  Brossier dipped his buttered toast in the café au lait and gulped it down with a voracity that surprised Louis. He was wearing a new hat that was the same kind as the old one, with the same reddish feather stuck in it. His coat looked new, too: loden, like the hat.

  “Not bad, this coat, hmm? You need one like this . . . You’d look great. I’ll take you to Tunmer’s. You can’t wear my old gabardine forever . . . Sorry to get you up so early, but I’m leaving again, for five days . . . To the southwest . . . I’ll arrange things for you when I get back.”

  He slipped some bills folded in four into Louis’s hand.

  “Here’s your pocket money. And don’t forget, when I get back you’ll start work. I’ll introduce you to that friend I told you about . . .”

  He looked at his watch and seemed preoccupied.

  “If you want to reach me, you can leave a message at Hotel Muguet, rue Chevert, in the seventh. They’ll give it to me. Hotel Muguet . . . INValides-0593.”

  He wrote the phone number down on a piece of paper.

  “Let’s plan to meet up in five days, at the same time, at the Alcyon de Breteuil on avenue Duquesne.”

  What could he be going to buy
or sell in the southwest? Louis wondered. Tires maybe? The idea made him want to laugh. Yes, tires.

  •

  “You worked for a year at Paris Perfume, on rue Vignon?” the fat blond asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why aren’t you working there anymore?”

  She lowered her head, and noticed that her stockings had a run.

  “I called them. It was nice of them not to press charges. Then again, shoplifting a few tubes of lipstick at your age, it’s not so terrible. No, no . . . Don’t worry . . .” His voice had become soft and gentle. “Did you know that your mother had a file back then?”

  A file. What did that mean? He handed her a sheet of paper with her first and last name written on it, her date of birth, and the words “Father unknown.” Below that, her mother’s first and last name. She read phrases at random: “The party was living by her wits . . . affairs . . . black market . . . Pacheco’s mistress during the German occupation . . . Questioned by the department, Quai de Gesvres, September 1944 . . . Deceased in Casablanca (Morocco), February 14, 1947, thirty-two years of age . . .”

  “We have a good memory.”

  He propped his elbows on the black plastic typewriter cover and smiled kindly at her. But she found his smile frightening, and the run in her stockings seemed to her like a wound that kept her from fleeing the room.

  •

  “Your move,” the fat blond said.

  She crossed the hall of the railway station and went into one of the waiting rooms. Empty. She sat down and started flipping through a magazine, trying to soothe her nerves.

  After a while, people started to come in and sit down. It was rush hour. The commuter trains unloaded their passengers while the crowds of people who had spent their day working in Paris pushed onto the departure platforms. This inverting of the hourglass would last until eight at night.

  It would be easy to lose herself in this mass of people, to escape the surveillance of the fat blond man and the other two, and get on a train, it didn’t matter which. But one of the plainclothes policemen came into the waiting room, sat down next to the door, and buried his nose in a newspaper, paying no attention to her.