Young Once

by Patrick Modiano

  Before long, all the seats were full. She looked around, keeping her eyes off the policeman. Exhausted faces, people waiting for their trains. A woman gave off a smell of face powder that mixed with the smell of cold tobacco. On the back wall, there was a white and sky-blue colored poster, with a skier gliding alone in the middle of a huge expanse of snow that reflected the sunlight. And the words: HOLIDAYS IN THE ENGADINE.

  A man outside the waiting room pressed his forehead against the glass door. Would she ever get out of this aquarium? Someone next to her stood up and left the room. The man looked at her through the glass. After hesitating a moment, he came in and sat down in the empty seat, and the edge of his coat brushed against her knee.

  “Do you have the time?”

  His voice, high and squeaky, didn’t go with his square face and crew-cut hair. He was wearing a bow tie.

  Before answering him, she glanced quickly at the plainclothes policeman, who gave her an almost imperceptible nod.

  “What train are you waiting for?” the man asked her.

  “The train to Cherbourg, at nine.”

  “Me too. What a coincidence. Would you like to have a drink while we wait? It’s almost an hour.”

  His voice was getting more and more high-pitched, but he also had a strange way of forming his words, as though his mouth were covered in vaseline.

  “If you want . . .”

  He walked fast, without letting her out of his sight. The plainclothes policeman followed them at a distance, off to one side.

  “Let’s have a cup of tea away from the station. I know a quiet place . . .”

  It was dark. He opened a car door. A DS-19. Then, in a sharp tone: “The place isn’t far, but it’d be quicker to drive.”

  He drove down rue d’Amsterdam.

  “You’re . . . a student?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you study?”

  She didn’t know what to answer.

  “English.”

  His hands on the wheel. A bit pudgy, and white, and entirely hairless. He was wearing a wedding ring. Before sitting down in his car, he had taken his coat off and folded it carefully. His suit was navy blue, his bow tie gray.

  He took rue Saint-Lazare and looked from side to side.

  “Funny, this neighborhood . . . I don’t like this neighborhood.” His lips pursed.

  “Look at that. Disgusting.”

  A woman was waiting under the rue de Budapest arcade and, behind her, a group of men were standing by a hotel’s front door.

  “Don’t you think that’s disgusting?”

  Since she didn’t answer: “You realize, if you were a girl like that . . . Disgusting, isn’t it?”

  He turned onto rue de Londres.

  “They take all comers. Poor girls . . .”

  “Is it far, where you’re taking me?”

  “No. It’s right here. Poor girls.”

  She decided to get away at the next red light. Suddenly he turned left into a small, deserted, very narrow alley that looked like a private driveway. He stopped. She tried to open the door but it was locked.

  “Wait a minute, I want to show you something . . .”

  She anxiously pushed the door handle again and hit the window with her shoulder.

  “No, no. Don’t bother, I have the key.”

  He turned around and placed a black briefcase on the backseat. He opened it and took out a large brown leather-bound album, then put the briefcase away again.

  “Here, look.”

  He opened the album. Carefully glued onto its pages were the kind of “special” photographs that twins with red, pockmarked faces used to peddle on the sly on boulevard de Clichy. He turned the pages carefully, with one finger, as though they were the pages of a missal.

  “Look . . . This one . . . is . . . my favorite . . .”

  A woman in a black velvet eye mask, in profile, was sucking a faceless man’s penis.

  “Do you like her?”

  He had let go of the album. He grabbed the back of her neck. She struggled but he held her tighter and tighter. He pinned her to the back of the seat with his right shoulder, reached back with his left arm, and opened the glove compartment.

  “Wait . . . I have to take my precautions . . .”

  He held up a half-unrolled condom, a few inches from her face.

  “You don’t mind, do you? I’m afraid of diseases.”

  He gripped her tighter and tighter and she tried to get free. He pushed her down onto the seat and she felt his whole weight on top of her.

  “It won’t last long. Don’t move . . .”

  All she could see was his gray bow tie, beating against her eyes.

  “Don’t move . . . It’ll be quick . . .”

  But one of the car doors opened. Someone pulled the man out of the car by his jacket collar. She sat up and the fat blond man helped her get out.

  They had shoved the man against a wall, between two high, locked shutters, and as he gesticulated wildly one of the plainclothes policemen was slapping him over and over with the back of his hand. They dragged him to their car, parked at the entrance to the alleyway.

  “I’ll be right there,” the fat blond shouted as the other two pushed the man into the car.

  Then, looking a little embarrassed, he went up to her.

  “That’s that. We can go have a drink, if you want.”

  The door of the DS-19 was still open. He closed it, after picking up something from the backseat.

  “He forgot this.”

  The fat blond showed her the bow tie, then shoved it in his pocket.

  They sat down at a table in a nearby café, on rue de Londres.

  “Two kirs!” the fat blond ordered.

  She drank hers down in one gulp.

  “Have another.”

  He had taken the bow tie out of his pocket and, while he fidgeted with it, told her about the man that he and his colleagues had just apprehended, “thanks to her cooperation.” An engineer, from Bois-Colombes. It had taken three months to track him down . . . He had almost killed a young German girl like that, the bastard.

  She was hardly listening, still upset by what had just happened. And the two kirs in a row she had drunk made her light-headed.

  “Another kir? Sure, come on. I’ll have another too.”

  He knew it would end at Gare Saint-Lazare. From long experience, going back to when he’d started with the force in this neighborhood. Saint-Lazare was the lowest place in Paris, a pit, a kind of sinkhole. Everything slips down into it eventually. You just have to wait. Once they were swimming around in the swamp of Saint-Lazare, you could hook them like a pike. It had been proven true again.

  “Tomorrow you’ll give a deposition. They’ll throw the book at that nut and I’ll give you back your passport.”

  He stood up, heavily.

  “Same address, all right? For the deposition. Tomorrow, two o’clock, at the Galvani police station. Then you can forget this ever happened.”

  He gave a vague smile and left the café in one smooth stride. He had forgotten the bow tie on the table, and she couldn’t take her eyes off it.

  In the end, what had happened didn’t matter at all. She wouldn’t even tell Bellune about it. She ordered another kir. Someone behind her was playing pinball and she heard the voice of a singer she liked, someone all the jukeboxes were playing that year, a flat voice, muffled, neither a man’s nor a woman’s, soaked up by the smoke, the jingling of the pinball machines, the murmurs of conversation, the splutter of the coffee machines, and the night on the square outside where the windows of the Royal Trinité Hotel glittered.

  Only one thing mattered. They would give her back her passport.

  •

  Finally, one afternoon in his office on rue de Berri, Bellune introduced her to two men: an obese, almost bald man with a black briefcase in his hand, and another with curly blond hair and hollow cheeks. Berne and Sardy, songwriters. They had written four songs for her and Bellune ha
nded them the music-publishing contract, which they signed.

  During the whole following week, she learned the songs with an Austrian pianist Bellune had known back at the time of Hawaii Rose, whom he sometimes used as a kind of secretary. When she knew the songs well, Bellune chose a date for the recording session.

  He went with her into the studio. She recorded the songs in two afternoons. Then he had several test records pressed with her four songs on them, “flexi-discs” as they were called. That night, she listened to them at his apartment, and she could hardly believe that when she put the disc on the record player, the voice she heard was her own. Bellune encouraged her, saying over and over that her voice on it sounded perfect, her contract was practically signed already. One of the songs was called “The Birds Return”; the chorus of another song began: “I threw my heart into the waves.”

  •

  He had wanted to bring in one of the flexi-discs with her songs himself, and she was waiting for him near the record company, in a little street running alongside the Gaumont Palace.

  When he returned, he told her that “the wheels were turning” and that he would definitely get a positive response back within a week. Then she could sign the contract.

  He decided to go back to his office on foot and they walked down boulevard des Batignolles on the sunny side of the street. Bellune said nothing and seemed preoccupied. She asked him lots of questions, which he didn’t answer. Eventually she asked him if there was something worrying him.

  “No, not at all. Nothing.”

  They turned left at the corner, onto boulevard Malesherbes, and Bellune, glancing distractedly at the buildings, suddenly stopped in front of a tiny town house whose door and one single window made it look like a dollhouse.

  “Look. How funny.”

  His slight accent, which was never really noticeable except when he spoke her name—Odile—was suddenly thicker. She stood next to him and looked at the building too, without understanding what it could be that had so struck him.

  “It’s so funny. Do you know what it was, back then? The Austrian consulate general.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. The Austrian consulate general . . .”

  He was lost in his memories. With a very gentle gesture he put his hand on her shoulder and said, as if talking to a child, “One day, I reported to this building. The first year I lived in Paris. Austria already no longer existed. But there was still an Austrian consulate general.”

  He lowered his voice, the same way you read Sophie’s Misfortunes to a little girl in a conspiratorial tone of voice, to enthrall her more.

  “So I walked into this building, which was the Austrian consulate. And they told me I had lost my Austrian nationality. The end. No more passport either. So I went to Parc Monceau and sat down on a bench.”

  He took her by the arm and, after one last look at the building’s black façade, pulled her toward the park gate.

  They sat down on a bench, near a sandbox where children were playing. He didn’t seem to want to go back to his office right away.

  “We should stay outside in the sun for a bit.”

  “Yes, good idea, Odile.”

  The story he had started to tell her seemed a little vague to her, and she would have liked him to give her more details, but he leaned his head back on the bench and, eyes closed, offered his face to the sun. She would have liked to know, for example, if he had sat on this same bench that afternoon, back then, after his visit to the consulate general of an Austria that no longer existed.

  •

  She rang the buzzer several times in a row. Nobody home. Since she had a key to the apartment, she opened the door herself.

  She called out but he didn’t answer. The apartment was silent. Bellune must have stayed late at the office.

  There was a large envelope on the table in the living room, with her name written on it in red pen. She opened it. It contained the rest of the flexi-discs of her two songs and a letter.

  My dear Odile,

  By the time you read this, I will have ended my life in a room at Hotel Rovaro, avenue des Ternes. I have lived in that hotel for a long time. I had just come from Austria. But it would take too long to explain and I don’t want to bore you.

  I’m optimistic about your record. Go see Dauvenne or Wohlfsohn for me, ÉTOile 50-52. They’ll help you.

  With love, and, as it says in a song from my youth, Sag’ beim Abschied leise “Servus.”

  Georg

  Don’t stay in the apartment, they might bother you with all kinds of questions.

  She didn’t have the strength to stand up, and she couldn’t take her eyes off the piano, where a ray of sun lit up part of the keyboard. She thought about the afternoons by the piano with the old Austrian, Bellune’s sometime secretary, who taught her the songs and even played her the overture to Hawaii Rose for fun. She stayed sitting in the leather armchair with the large envelope in her hand.

  The telephone rang but she didn’t move. The ringing went on for a long time, then, in the silence, the ray of sunlight slid along the gray carpeting.

  •

  The phone rang again. This time, she went over and picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Who’s this?”

  It was a man’s voice, nervous.

  “A . . . a friend of Monsieur Bellune’s.”

  “Wait. Hold on, please.”

  The man was talking to someone. She heard a murmur of voices.

  “Hello, is this Georges Bellune’s residence?”

  A more muffled voice than the first. She hung up. She used to walk past the Trocadéro gardens. The same way every evening, for two months. The gardens. The quay. The arch of the Bir-Hakeim bridge. She remembered the Trocadéro’s aquarium, which she had gone to see with him, and the stairs they had taken to get back up onto boulevard Delessert. He had remarked that the neighborhood was built on several levels, on a hillside, which was what gave it its particular charm. And the nights on the deck, those remarkably mild December nights after the snow had fallen—nights when they would try to penetrate the mysteries of the windows and rooftops they could see nearby.

  •

  She asked to see a phone book in a café and looked up the hotel’s address, then walked up avenue des Ternes.

  When she reached the right number, she saw an ambulance and a police car parked on the sidewalk and several uniformed policemen talking to each other. They were gathered in front of the entrance to the hotel. Two men came down the stairs and she quickly turned away. She had recognized one of them: the fat blond from the other time, the one who had used her as bait in Gare Saint-Lazare. The previous week, she had gone to the Galvani police station to sign the deposition, and he had given her back her passport.

  She ran, without daring to look back, afraid of seeing that the fat blond man really was following her, like those shimmering blue flies you can’t get free of, that cling to your face or your hands. She was sure that if it was him lurking around there, it meant Bellune was really dead.

  •

  She sat at a café table in the passageway connecting Gare Saint-Lazare with the Hotel Terminus. She looked out the window, down at the street and the people leaving the station and waiting at the taxi stand. A vague idea of taking the train, leaving Paris as fast as she could, had guided her steps here, and she remembered the fat blond’s remark: In the end you always wash up in Gare Saint-Lazare, at the bottom of the pit.

  It was dark. A monotonous coming and going between the concourse and the café. People gulping down a drink in a hurry and leaving to catch their commuter trains. Down below, they tumbled into the taxis by ones and twos but the line at the stand never got any shorter. She alone was motionless in the middle of all this restless activity.

  She ordered a kir, the same as the other time with the fat blond man. She forgot why she was there. Her head was spinning from the people sitting down, getting up, sitting down, from the din of the concourse. How long had it bee
n since she had slept? She no longer saw anything around her except blurry silhouettes, big moving blotches, while insects buzzing around her ear drowned out little by little all the other sounds.

  •

  Brossier had lowered the window of his compartment and leaned his head out.

  “I’ll call you at Hotel Langeac the day after tomorrow, Louis. Around five.”

  The train shuddered into motion. Brossier, leaning out the window, gestured urgently: five fingers of one hand. It clearly meant: “Don’t forget, five o’clock.”

  Louis walked back to the concourse. It was too late to go have dinner at rue de la Croix-Nivert. He was heading for the stairs out of the station when he noticed, to his left, the little café in the glass passageway. He went in, sat down, and ordered a café au lait and two pieces of bread.

  There were no other customers this late. Except one girl at a table in back who seemed to be asleep, her forehead resting on her folded arms. Louis saw only her brown hair.

  The light in the cafeteria was a slightly murky yellow, as though used up, dirtied, by the breath of everyone who had breathed there during rush hour. The only bright, clear light was coming from the dark window next door, where a poster was stuck to the wall: HOLIDAYS IN THE ENGADINE.

  The whole time he was eating his bread, he couldn’t take his eyes off that hair spilling over the table. A neck, a forehead, a hand were barely visible. Not the least movement, the least sign of breathing. Maybe she was dead.

  He drank his coffee. The waiter had left and now a silence reigned, barely disturbed by the sounds of the diesel engines of the taxis parked in front of the station, or the regular slamming of the doors. On the table, next to the girl’s hair, was a glass half full of something; Louis wondered from the color if it might be a grenadine.

  The waiter reappeared and started to put the chairs up on the tables. It was closing time. Louis paid his bill.

  “Is she asleep?”