Young Once

by Patrick Modiano

Yes, they were leaving the day after tomorrow. Louis was seized with a feeling of helplessness. What were they going to do in Paris? He felt the need to confide in these Englishmen, even ask their advice. No one had ever once given him and Odile advice. They were alone in the world.

  “Really? You have to leave?” Harold said. And he emptied his pipe by nervously knocking it against the heel of his shoe. “Why do you have to go?”

  Louis was struck by his childish disappointment, but also by the concern and affection visible in Harold Howard’s face. They were in strange contrast with his colossal build, the rough tweed, the velvet corduroy, the acrid smell of pipe that enveloped him.

  •

  Axter took them to Southampton in the bus he had used to fetch them. The three of them, sitting in the back of the empty bus, did not speak. Axter pensively smoked his pipe. The weather was overcast and gloomy.

  The bus parked on the departure pier in front of the customs hangar. Axter was carrying their bags, which he himself presented to the customs officer. Just when they were leaving to board the Normania, he caught Louis by the shoulder.

  “Still, you should be careful with Roland. Don’t let yourself get caught up. He’s a charming man, but also a . . . a . . .” He tried to find the right word. “A kind of adventurer.”

  They leaned against the railing and waited for their ship to leave. Axter, standing on the running board of the bus, pipe in his mouth, waved goodbye at them wildly with both arms.

  •

  Bejardy and Nicole Haas were waiting for them at Le Havre, at the exit from customs. It was almost eight o’clock and getting dark.

  “Did you have a good trip?” Bejardy asked in a dull voice.

  Nicole Haas smiled at them, without saying anything. They sat in the backseat of Bejardy’s car, with Bejardy at the wheel, Nicole Haas next to him.

  He drove fast and seemed nervous. He and Nicole Haas had not exchanged a single word, as though they had just had a fight. Bejardy had turned on the radio, and every so often he turned up the volume more.

  “So, Roland, have you decided yet?” Nicole Haas asked.

  “I don’t know, Coco. Maybe the hotel in Verneuil? What do you think?”

  She didn’t answer. Bejardy turned back to look at Odile and Louis.

  “You must be tired from the trip. It doesn’t make sense to drive another three hours. We can spend the night at a hotel . . . Unless you’d rather go straight back to Paris?”

  Without answering, Louis took Odile’s hand and squeezed it. They both felt that there was nothing to say. Anyway, Bejardy had already turned up the radio again.

  •

  They had dinner. Nicole Haas hadn’t wanted to eat in the large empty dining room at the inn, and Bejardy had chosen a table near the bar.

  She was visibly giving Bejardy the cold shoulder, but she was very friendly to Odile and Louis.

  “And Axter? How is he doing?” Bejardy asked.

  “What do you think of Axter?” Nicole Haas asked at once, as though she wanted them to answer her question and not Bejardy’s.

  “He’s nice,” Louis said. “When you met him, you were running a restaurant on a boat, in Neuilly?”

  “Ah. So he told you about that?” Bejardy said, looking embarrassed.

  “You owned a boat, Roland?” Nicole Haas said ironically. “You? A boat?”

  “No. We set up a restaurant on a boat, with Brossier,” Bejardy said. “By Bois de Boulogne.”

  “And what about the boat?”

  “It belonged to the Touring Club de France,” Bejardy said, getting exasperated.

  “I would have loved to see you on that boat. Did you wear a captain’s hat?”

  And Nicole lit a cigarette with the same nonchalant gesture as that first time in Paris, with the same Zippo lighter that had so surprised Louis.

  “Axter is a real Englishman,” she said. “Did you see his wife too?”

  “Yes.”

  “She seems more like his mother, don’t you think?”

  “And yet they’re the same age,” Bejardy said dryly.

  “I don’t think so. There must be as big an age difference between them as between you and me.”

  Bejardy shrugged. He was having trouble keeping his temper. Odile looked back and forth between Bejardy and Nicole, interested in what was happening.

  “Doesn’t he seem much older than me?” Nicole asked Odile, indicating Bejardy.

  Odile didn’t know what to say. Louis lowered his head.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Odile said timidly.

  “She’s polite at least,” Nicole said. “And well brought up.”

  “Much better brought up than you, Coco,” Bejardy said.

  His face was calm and relaxed again and he had taken Nicole’s hand. Underneath it all, Louis thought, Bejardy liked it that Nicole treated him so badly in front of other people. Was it just one of their little games?

  “I have never met anyone with a character as bad as Coco’s,” Bejardy said, stroking her hand.

  Louis looked at the Zippo lighter that Nicole had put on the table. He picked it up, lit it, and contemplated the black smoke that the flame gave off.

  “When I was in boarding school, I dreamed of having a lighter like this.”

  “Really?” Nicole said. “You can have it.”

  She smiled at him and her smile was so sweet, so understanding, that Louis had the feeling their faces could have come closer and closer at that moment, their lips could touch.

  “Yes, please. The lighter is yours.”

  •

  Two rooms had been reserved for the night in an annex to the inn, on the other side of the garden. Just as they left the bar, Bejardy took Louis’s arm and held him back.

  “I wanted to thank you for what you’ve done for me. We’ll discuss it in Paris. You know your commission is waiting for you there, Louis.”

  “Oh, it was nothing. Really.”

  In fact, he would have been relieved if Bejardy forgot to give him this commission.

  “I insist. You need some pocket money. At your age . . .”

  They rejoined Odile and Nicole Haas, who had already crossed the lawn. The path was lit by a lantern hanging on the outside of the annex.

  An outdoor staircase led to the second floor, and the rooms opened out onto a balcony with a rough-hewn wooden railing.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Their rooms were next door to each other.

  •

  Around two in the morning, Louis and Odile were woken by voices—Bejardy’s and Nicole’s. At first they couldn’t understand what the voices were saying. Bejardy was talking nonstop and it seemed to Louis that he was reading something or talking to someone on the phone.

  “You bastard!” Nicole Haas shouted.

  “Shut up!”

  Something shattered on the floor.

  “You’re crazy! You’ll wake everyone up!”

  “I don’t care!”

  “Do you think they’ll start hitting each other?” Odile said.

  She leaned her head against the hollow of Louis’s shoulder. They didn’t move.

  “You can keep your dough!” Nicole Haas shouted. “I’m taking the car and going back to Paris!”

  “Enough already!”

  One of them slapped the other. The sound of a scuffle.

  “Crook! Crook! You’re just a pathetic crook!”

  “Shut up!”

  “Murderer!!”

  “Coco . . .”

  He must have covered her mouth with his hand, because her voice sounded muffled, like a moan.

  “Bastard! Bastard!”

  “All right, calm down. Calm down, Coco.”

  Their voices got softer. Suddenly, they laughed. Silence. She let out a sigh, then another, at intervals that grew closer and closer together.

  Odile and Louis stayed motionless, their eyes wide. A latticework of reflections played on the blanket.

  “I
wonder what’s happening over there,” Louis said.

  After a few moments, he felt the same smothering feeling of dependence in this room that he had felt in boarding school and in the army. The days followed one another and you wondered what was happening over there, and you hardly believed that you would ever be free of this prison.

  “We have to leave,” Odile said.

  Leave. Of course. Bejardy had no hold over him. None at all. He didn’t owe him anything. No one and nothing had any hold over him. Even the school yard and the barracks yard now seemed unreal to him, and harmless, like the memory of a little park somewhere.

  BROSSIER was waiting for them at one of the outdoor tables at place Jussieu, since the night was warm. When Odile and Louis arrived, he stood up and gave them a hug, a gesture full of an affection that was unusual for him.

  He had changed a lot since they’d left for England. He was wearing an old sky-blue tracksuit jacket and sneakers, his face was thinner, and he was starting to grow a beard, which he stroked from time to time.

  “Louis. I have big news for you. I’m not working with Bejardy any more. It’s over.”

  He waited with a triumphant look for Louis and Odile’s reaction.

  “What are you going to do now?” Odile asked.

  “Listen . . . I’ve never been this happy.” He puffed up his chest with pride. “I’ve signed up at the Faculty of Sciences, as an independent auditor. That’ll let me feel even closer to Jacqueline. We’re in the same building, Quai Saint-Bernard.”

  “You’ve broken with Bejardy completely?” Louis asked.

  “Completely. I don’t ever want to see him again. I’m making a clean break with that whole period of my life. I’m an entirely different person now, Louis.”

  Between the traveling salesman with the puffy face Louis had met in Saint-Lô and this man in his tracksuit jacket, with shining eyes and haggard cheeks, there was not the slightest family resemblance. Had he even kept his Tyrolean hats?

  “I’m sorry I’m in such a funny outfit,” Brossier said. “I’ve just come from a gym I go to once a week.”

  “And what about me?” Louis suddenly said. “I’m supposed to stay with Bejardy alone? You’re just going to drop me?”

  “No, not at all. I hope you’ll follow my lead . . . Jacqueline won’t be long, her class runs a little later tonight.”

  The square with its trees was like one in a country town. There were a few people at the edge of the sidewalk playing boule. Music from a jukebox came out of the café-tabac next door.

  “I had to show you this neighborhood. You have the Jar-din des Plantes right nearby, and the Arènas de Lutèce, where Jacqueline takes me every now and then. When we don’t go to the U restaurant or the cafeteria, we have dinner in a little Mexican place next to the Arènas. Let’s all go together some night, if you want.”

  His voice was no longer guttural, it was alive with excitement, clear and melodious. He had left his usual vocabulary behind, and the slang words that had always spiced up his conversation before—bones, sharp, zilch, brass nickel—would now have sounded all wrong coming from his mouth.

  Jacqueline Boivin came and sat down at their table, and rested a student satchel on her knees. Louis was entranced by her Ethiopian grace.

  “How was class?” Brossier asked, kissing her on the forehead.

  “Good.”

  She turned to Odile and Louis.

  “It’s nice to see you again. Has Jean-Claude told you?” Her face sought their approval.

  “I think he’s doing the right thing,” Louis said.

  “Will you walk us to Cité?” Brossier suggested. “We can have a bite to eat there. I’ll carry your book bag, Jacqueline.”

  They passed the Lycée Henri-IV, then the Sainte-Geneviève church, and came out on place du Panthéon, with Jacqueline Boivin on Brossier’s arm and he with the satchel in his hand.

  “Do you know this area?” Brossier asked.

  “No,” Odile said. “I’ve never been to college.”

  “It’s never too late! Here’s proof.” He pointed to himself and then kissed Jacqueline on the neck.

  “All you need to do is fill out the registration forms,” Louis said.

  On rue Soufflot, by the outdoor tables of the Mahieu, there were groups of people in lively conversation drifting by from left to right. Brossier, not moving, pulled Jacqueline Boivin closer to him. Next to them, Odile and Louis let the clusters of people push past them and were almost carried away in the stream. Luckily, Brossier held them firmly by the hand.

  “On the right,” he said, in a tour guide’s sententious voice, “on boulevard Saint-Michel, you have Capoulade . . . Then the Picart bookstore, where I often go with Jacqueline. And Chanteclair, the record store . . . Farther down, there’s Gibert, where I sometimes sell used books to get a little pocket money. And the Café de Cluny. There’s a pool table on the second floor . . .”

  He sounded breathless, as though panicking at the thought that there wasn’t enough time to introduce them to all the many delights of the neighborhood. A whole life wouldn’t be enough time.

  At the Gare du Luxembourg they waited on benches for the Sceaux line train to arrive.

  “You need to follow my lead, Louis, and make a clean break with Roland. I’m sure you can influence him, Odile. He doesn’t need to work for Bejardy.”

  In the train bringing them to Cité Universitaire, Brossier affectionately held Jacqueline Boivin against his shoulder.

  “Let me speak frankly with you, Louis. Roland is a desperate man. Don’t stay on a sinking ship.”

  “Have you known him a long time?” Louis asked.

  He felt that now he could ask the questions Brossier had always answered vaguely before, and that this time, now that it was over between him and Bejardy, Brossier would explain everything, down to the last detail.

  “I met Bejardy right after the war. Almost twenty years ago now . . .”

  “That was when you ran a restaurant together, on a boat?” Louis said.

  “Ah, yes. The Longchamp Schooner. Who told you about that? It was a real disaster. Roland wanted the waiters to wear Provençal cowboy outfits.”

  He gave Jacqueline a mischievous kiss on the cheek.

  “You’re not bored with these old war stories, are you, darling?”

  Jacqueline kindly shrugged her shoulders and gave Odile a complicitous glance. They had reached the Denfert-Rochereau station.

  “I met Roland when I was eighteen. He was five years older than me.”

  He leaned toward Louis.

  “Roland’s problem can be captured in a single sentence: ‘I want to, but I can’t.’ Let me put it more crudely, if you don’t mind: Roland always farted louder than his ass.”

  Now this was the Brossier from Saint-Lô.

  They got out at the Cité Universitaire station. A boy nearby was kicking a soccer ball and Brossier made a fake and managed to dribble the ball all the way to the stairs without the boy being able to get it back. He was over the moon at his accomplishment.

  “Should we have a bite at the Turk’s place?” Brossier said. “It’s a little farther down.”

  They walked down boulevard Jourdan toward Charléty Stadium. Pink and blue neon lit up a kind of glassed-in counter in the middle of the sidewalk, under the trees, with a few tables around it.

  “Four club sandwiches and four pints of the blonde on tap,” Brossier ordered.

  The wind carried the smells of Parc Montsouris over to them, and the night was bright enough for them to see the palace of the Bey of Tunis on the great lawn. Opposite them, on the other side of the empty street, was the Great Britain building, whose wood-paneled dining hall Brossier had said he liked. An empty bus appeared from time to time at the station a little farther up.

  “What are you two doing for the holidays?” Brossier asked.

  He and Jacqueline had decided to stay in Paris during July and August. In the mornings they would sunbathe on the Cité Univer
sitaire lawns. In the afternoons, they’d play tourist—go visit Les Invalides, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Sainte-Chapelle. At night, they’d have dinner on a bateau mouche. Maybe they’d venture out as far as Versailles, on a tour bus for “organized visits,” and “catch a sound and light show” at the Bassin de Neptune fountain.

  “I love doing that kind of thing as a vacation,” Jacqueline said. “You should come with us.”

  “The main thing,” Brossier said, “is to always go on group tours. Everything completely taken care of. With guides. You understand, Louis. Guides.”

  He insisted on that. For a long time, he had felt an urgent need for “organization,” for “guides.”

  But Louis was set on finding out how Brossier had met Bejardy.

  “To begin at the beginning,” Brossier said, “I met Roland right after the war, at a family pension in Neuilly called the Chestnut Trees. He was living there with his mother and his fiancée at the time, an Englishwoman.”

  And he, Jean-Claude Brossier, a fat young man of nineteen, got off the boat in Normandy and enrolled in the art school in Paris, École Boulle. But he soon forgot about art school and joined in the rhythm of their lives. They took drives around the countryside, sometimes as far as Deauville; went to the races; played bridge at night with Bejardy’s mother in the little living room at the Chestnut Trees. Roland had earned a Médaille militaire in Germany and was going into business. And Hélène, Roland’s fiancée . . . She was so lazy. One day, when a bag of coffee turned up at the pension—something rare in that period of rationing—Hélène had let out a sigh at the prospect of having to grind the beans.

  Jacqueline Boivin chewed quietly on her sandwich. Odile had a cigarette at her lips, which Louis lit with the Zippo. And Brossier? He seemed sad, all of a sudden, from bringing up these distant memories. His face was drawn, and Louis was sorry he had asked him these questions.

  “It’s true, I came here from Normandy to go to art school.”

  He looked paler and paler, as though realizing that the satchel he had on his knees, his tracksuit jacket and student status, even Jacqueline herself with her gray pleated skirt and beige twinset, were no longer enough to protect him from the passage of time and the indifference of the world.