Young Once

by Patrick Modiano

  He rarely shared these doubts with Odile. On the contrary, his years of solitude, at boarding school and in the army, had given him the habit of not trusting anyone, concealing his worries. He forced himself to seem calm around her, and convinced her that his job was respectable. Bejardy’s protective attitude could be explained by the fact that he used to know his father. This was only a half lie: Bejardy had told him that he had been a cycling enthusiast in his youth and that he was delighted to be in a position to give Memling the cyclist’s son a job.

  No, he couldn’t show the least unease around Odile. To do so would mean risking the fragile equilibrium of their life together. They no longer lived in a garret, after all, but in an apartment on rue Caulaincourt. And you could read, right there in black and white, on the list of renters stuck on the concierge’s window: “Mr. and Mrs. Memling.” Not bad for a twenty year old.

  •

  But he did let himself ask Brossier some questions. They were sitting in one of the booths at the Rêve, a café on rue Caulaincourt that Louis liked for its name: Café Dream. It amused him and Odile to say, “See you at the Dream at five.”

  “You don’t trust Roland, do you?”

  “No, it’s not that . . .”

  “Roland is a good guy, old boy. Not everyone gets the Médaille militaire at twenty-three.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re doing very ordinary work. It’s boring. I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s a job like a messenger’s, or a bellhop’s. There’s nothing suspicious about that, is there?”

  He gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder.

  “I’m joking. You’re more like Roland’s secretary. Me too, for that matter. You think that’s anything to be ashamed of?”

  “No, but what exactly does Roland do?”

  “Roland is a businessman, with an interest in cars, and other things,” Brossier answered carefully, as though reciting a lesson.

  “How did you meet him?”

  “I’ll tell you someday when we have more time.”

  They had left and were walking down the street. A crowd of children bursting out of the school yard jostled them. One of them was wearing roller skates and the others were chasing him.

  “You’re nervous, I understand,” Brossier said in his husky voice, a little breathless, the voice he used to talk about matters close to his heart.

  This was not the blustering Brossier anymore. How strange, Louis thought—that a person can have two different voices like that.

  He was saying that at Louis’s age, one often has rather vague and boring tasks to perform; you have to make do however you can. Things get clearer later, but when you’re twenty they’re still in a rough and sketchy state. Everything is hazy. That’s life in the beginning, old boy. I myself . . . One day, I’ll tell you everything.

  •

  She tried to keep busy while Louis was out. She had kept a friend named Mary from her time at the cabaret-restaurant in Auteuil; Mary still worked there. She sang and danced for a few minutes, accompanied by a group of balalaika players and dressed in a “Ukrainian princess” costume, which looked more like an outfit from the Tyrolean Alps. But the folklore act was nothing more than a temporary way to earn some money. Her dream was to open a little fashion boutique. She discussed it with Odile and they made plans to go into business together.

  In the meantime, Mary could work at home and build up a clientele. Odile wondered how they could pull together enough money to open the shop. They had already decided on its name, Chez Mary Bakradzé, thinking the strange name would work in their favor. Under “Chez Mary Bakradzé,” in capital letters, it would say “MODE—FASHION,” a label Odile had admired on the pediment of a store in the Saint-Honoré neighborhood.

  Mary drew the patterns and knew how to cut the fabric. She had worked for a dressmaker, a friend of the family, when she was very young. Odile asked her about her parents but never got a straight answer: Sometimes Mary said her father and mother were separated and living abroad; sometimes they were living in a house in the south of France and would be coming to visit her any day now; sometimes they had disappeared. The one fixed point in the fog—the only member of the family who had left any visible trace—was Mary’s grandfather, a writer exiled to Paris, one Paul Bakradzé. He devoted his talents to portraying, in delicate brushstrokes, life in a military garrison in southern Russia. One of his novels had even been translated into French, and Mary piously kept a worn old copy of it.

  She was blond, petite, with very fair, almost pink skin and pale blue eyes.

  Odile and Louis saw her on Sundays. Mary lived in the area between avenue de la Grande-Armée and avenue Foch, a hybrid zone where the sixteenth arrondissement becomes solid and residential but the streets are still under the sway of the garages, stores selling bicycles or ball bearings, old dance halls, and the ghost of the old Luna Park.

  The three of them would stroll in the Bois de Boulogne, from Porte Dauphine to the lakes. There, they would take a rowboat and paddle for an hour. Or else they would moor at the dock of the Chalet des Îles and play a game of miniature golf. When it got dark, they would go back to Mary’s apartment: three rooms, with the first two serving as anteroom and living room. The third, at the end of a long hall, was Mary’s bedroom.

  When they arrived, ten or so people would be crowded into the living room. Older people, some of them quite elderly, playing bridge or chatting over tea. Mary hugged a woman of about sixty as she walked past—tall, moon-faced, with slanting eyes and the authority of mistress of the house. Her aunt, Mary told Louis and Odile.

  The gathering talked or played cards in the dimly lit room. Every time, Mary would light the lamps and the chandelier, as though this task had been left to her because the others thought it was too hard to flip a switch, or beneath their dignity. Or maybe the idea never crossed their minds.

  In Mary’s room, they listened to records and talked. Odile and Louis had found in her the carefree laziness that was actually natural to them both. They were all the same age, born the same year. They understood one another, and Odile and Louis often stayed the night.

  Mary would bring them something to eat, a piece of cake or a bowl of soup. They would hear the murmur of voices in the living room through the half-open door. Little by little, the conversations would die out, the people would leave. A man would be talking on the phone in the hall. He would be quiet for long stretches, and they would think he had hung up every time, but then he would say something else, before falling silent again. This conventicle in an unknown language on the phone would go on for hours, often until morning.

  •

  One Sunday, one of Mary’s friends came by, a young Spaniard their age named Jordan. He was looking for cabaret work with his drag-queen number. On Mary’s suggestion, he had introduced himself to the manager of the Auteuil nightclub and been hired for a trial period.

  He would be starting there in a few days, and he wanted a stage dress like the one the heroine wore in an illustrated edition of Louÿs’s The Woman and the Puppet that he had found at one of the used-book stalls on the quais. Mary and Odile decided to make him one, and spent days cutting and stitching in Mary’s room while Louis read a mystery novel. At each fitting, Jordan asked Louis for his opinion. The dress looked good on him, and with his soft features, under his mantilla, the illusion was very convincing.

  The evening of his debut, Louis and Odile went to the nightclub. Jordan was on after Mary. The balalaikas fell silent and, in the darkness, a deep voice announced: “La Cigarrera!”

  The first notes of Hummel’s Bolero sounded, which Jordan was going to dance to; he had brought the tape himself. When the lights came on, Jordan was standing in the middle of the stage, pale and paralyzed in his dress.

  The castanets fell from his hand like dead fruit. He stood there unmoving for several seconds, then collapsed on the floor. He had fainted from stage fright—or hunger, since he had eaten almost nothing for two weeks, afraid of losing his
“figure” and not being able to fit into his dress for the act.

  He was fired on the spot, and Odile, Louis, and Mary had to console him.

  ON THE first day of spring, Bejardy invited Odile and Louis out to lunch, and the two of them decided to take advantage of the sun by walking the whole way to Quai Louis-Blériot.

  Brossier opened the door and brought them into the living room, where a table had been set for five. Bejardy was with a young brunette, the one whose photograph Louis had noticed on the mantelpiece the first day.

  “Nicole Haas, a friend . . . Mr. and Mrs. Memling . . . You remember, Coco, it’s Mrs. Memling, who sings ‘La Chanson des rues’ so beautifully.”

  He always called them that, in a ceremonious tone, because he’d thought it was funny when he read “Mr. and Mrs. Memling” on the list of tenants in their apartment building.

  “Good idea,” he’d told Louis. “That looks more serious. Now you need to get married. I’ll be your best man if you want.”

  Nicole Haas had an elegant face but severe features. She was tall, almost Bejardy’s height, and Louis was struck by her boyish looks, especially her way of smoking and of sitting with her legs outstretched, high heels resting on the low table.

  “Dinner is served, monsieur,” Brossier said formally.

  “Louis, sit on Coco’s right. Mrs. Memling on my right . . .”

  No one spoke much during lunch. Nicole Haas, at the head of the table, seemed to be in a bad mood. Bejardy gazed lovingly at her. She was younger than him—barely thirty.

  “Are you going riding this afternoon, Coco?” Bejardy asked.

  “No. I have to go to Equistable. I need a saddle.”

  She pouted and, with a nonchalant gesture, poured herself a large glass of water.

  “Equistable is a good place to buy one, I think,” Brossier said.

  She shrugged. “Yes, but I usually go to Ramaget.”

  She seemed annoyed at Bejardy and Brossier, but curious about and friendly toward Odile and Louis.

  “Do you ride?”

  “No,” Odile said.

  “Why haven’t you ever invited them to Vertbois?” she asked Bejardy.

  “We’ll invite them this summer, Nicole.”

  She turned back to Odile and Louis and smiled at them.

  “If he brings you to Vertbois, I’ll teach you how to ride a horse.”

  “Vertbois is a . . . family property, in Sologne,” Bejardy said. “You’ll have to see it sometime.”

  “Vertbois is the cradle of the Counts of Bejardy,” Nicole Haas said ironically. “Second Empire ‘nobility.’ Roland added the ‘de’ himself.”

  This time, Bejardy lost his temper, and the subservient look he had been giving Nicole Haas grew hard.

  “Nonsense, Coco. Louis, my boy, you have before you a textbook case of snobbery. Nicole here is obsessed with the aristocracy.”

  Nicole Haas burst out laughing and lit a cigarette.

  “Stop, you fool.” Loving contempt for Bejardy shone through her words.

  A tray with coffee was waiting on the desk on the other side of the room. In the hall, Nicole Haas opened a window and the wind billowed the gauze curtains. Bejardy served the coffee himself.

  Nicole Haas, Odile, and Louis were sitting on the velvet sofa. Bejardy and Brossier, leaning on the desk, kept silent, perhaps afraid to provoke a bad-tempered word from Nicole Haas. But she was ignoring them.

  She took a leather cigarette case out of her bag and held it out to Odile, then to Louis. She lit their cigarettes herself, with a lighter that had a high flame. Louis was surprised to see it in her hand: It was one of the Zippo lighters from the American army that they had tried to get ahold of at all costs when he was in boarding school.

  “Coco, do you want me to come with you to Equistable?”

  But she turned to Louis: “You have a nice name, Monsieur de Memling.”

  “His name is just Memling, no ‘de,’ ” Bejardy said.

  She didn’t listen to him. She smoked her cigarette and watched the gauze curtains, bathed in sunlight, that the wind was waving back and forth like a fluttering scarf.

  •

  Nicole Haas suddenly stood up and went over to the ashtray on Bejardy’s desk to put out her cigarette.

  “I have to go.”

  “Do you need the car?” Bejardy asked.

  “No.”

  She shook hands with Odile and Louis.

  “I hope to see you again.”

  And, without paying the least attention to Bejardy, she headed for the door.

  “See you tonight, Coco,” Bejardy said. “Be good.”

  She did not even take the trouble to turn around, and shut the door behind her. Brossier gave a little nervous smile. Bejardy sat down on the sofa, next to Odile and Louis, and sighed.

  “She’s not a bad girl, despite how it looks. Louis, I have to talk to you . . . Let’s go to the next room for a minute.”

  “Tell me, Madame Memling, would you care to play a game of chess while they’re talking?” Brossier suggested.

  “Why not?” Odile said, keeping her eye on Louis as Bejardy led him into the next room with a hand on his shoulder, a gesture meant to be protective and friendly.

  •

  They walked into the room where Odile and Louis had spent the night. The bright Citroën factory building on the other side of the Seine looked like it belonged in an airfield.

  “Nice view, hmm?” Bejardy said. “When I started out, I had a garage in that neighborhood there, across the river. Rue Balard. Back when I would go see your father race . . . I saw him race for the first time in 1938, at the Vel’ d’Hiv. I was sixteen.”

  “Did you know him?” Louis asked.

  “No. I knew Aerts, and Charles Pélissier, but I spent more time with automobile people.”

  Was it the mention of his father, or the term Bejardy used, “automobile people,” which sounded a bit like “captains of industry” or “gentleman rider”? Whatever the reason, Louis suddenly saw himself in a large, chilly, unused garage. Rays of sunlight were falling through a glass roof. The branches outside traced shadows on the floor like the shadows of leaves on the surface of a lake.

  His childhood.

  Bejardy had lain down on the bed and was resting his feet on the padded bedposts so as not to get the satin bedspread dirty. Louis stayed standing, by the window.

  “So here it is. I need you to do something for me. You’re taking a little trip to England.”

  •

  In the living room, sitting at the low table, Brossier and Odile were absorbed in their chess game. Odile had acquired a taste for it under Mary’s influence; it was Mary who had taught her and Louis how the pieces moved.

  Bejardy and Louis followed the game in silence. After ten or fifteen minutes, Odile said checkmate. Brossier was not a very expert player either.

  “A formidable opponent, our little Mrs. Memling,” Brossier said with a smile.

  •

  Outside, they walked in the direction of Porte d’Auteuil. The streets were deserted. Now and then a bus would pass, and its whir would dissipate in the sunlight.

  They felt light, as if they were breathing in the open air again after a long time underwater. Maybe, Louis thought, it was because winter was over. He remembered back to December, leaving his barracks with his soggy shoes. The swishy watery noise they made with every step gave him the feeling of being permanently bogged down. Now he would happily run barefoot on the dry sidewalk.

  “What are you thinking about?” Odile asked him, taking his arm.

  “We’re going to England. I’ll explain . . .”

  “To England?”

  She was unfazed. This afternoon, anything seemed possible to her.

  They eventually reached the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Loud groups of people were making their way to the racetrack entrance.

  “Let’s take a boat ride,” Louis said.

  On their way to the lake, they changed their
mind. The wind gently stirring the leaves and scattering the children’s laughs and screams, the sun, the prospect of this trip to England—it all made them lazy. They sat down at an outdoor table at the Auteuil farm and ordered two cherry milks.

  They didn’t talk. Odile rested her head on Louis’s shoulder and drank her white grenadine through a straw. Down on the riding path, an Amazonian brunette riding a spotted gray horse passed slowly by, and they thought they recognized Nicole Haas.

  JUST AFTER the Russian Orthodox Easter, which they celebrated with Mary, Brossier set up an appointment for them at the “French-English Youth Exchange” office across the street from the Opéra Comique. He was signing them up to spend their holidays in Bournemouth, the seaside resort in Hampshire.

  In a narrow room cluttered with folders, they were received by a Mr. “A. Stewart,” according to the name they saw on a brass plate on the door. He was in his eighties, with wrinkles around his eyes and mottled skin. All their papers were ready. Louis and Odile only had to give their dates of birth.

  “I said that you’re students,” Stewart said in the voice of an insect. “It’s better that way.”

  “You’re right,” Brossier said.

  “Of course you’re not obligated to stay to the end,” Stewart said.

  “I know,” Louis said.

  “How’s Roland?” Stewart asked.

  “He’s fine.”

  He walked them to the door.

  “I knew Roland de Bejardy’s father very well,” Stewart said, suddenly serious, turning to Odile and Louis. “We were close friends.”

  •

  Brossier had things to do and asked Louis to take Bejardy’s car, which the three of them had used to go to the Youth Exchange office on rue Favart. Odile and Louis walked at random and sat down at an outdoor café table on rue Réaumur, near the window. There was a copy of the financial newspaper, Cote Desfossés, on the table.

  Louis, for appearances’ sake, flipped through the paper and his eyes were drawn to the Unlisted Securities section. The time had come to tell Odile the reason for this trip to England, but he didn’t know how to bring up the delicate subject.