Paris Nocturne

by Patrick Modiano

  Georges Accad 28 Rue de la Rochefoucauld, Paris 9e

  Yvette Dintillac 75 Rue Laugier

  André Gabison Calle Jorge Juan 17, Madrid

  Jean-Maurice Jedlinski Casa Montalvo, Biarritz

  and Marie-José Vasse

  Jacques Piche Berlin, Steglitz, Orleanstrasse 2

  Patrick de Terouane 21 Rue Berlioz, Nice

  Suzy Kraay Vijzelstraat 98, Amsterdam

  I was told that each hotel passed these forms on to the vice squad, where they would be arranged in alphabetical order. Apparently they have all since been destroyed, but I don’t believe it. They remain intact in their filing cabinets. One night, just to kill time, a retired police officer started leafing through these old files and he came across André Gabison’s or Marie-José Vasse’s form. He wondered why, after more than thirty years, these people remained missing, unknown at their addresses. He would never know the truth of it. A long time ago, a girl used to give piano lessons. In the hotel rooms around Gare de Lyon where we used to meet, I noticed that they still had the blackout curtains from the civil defence, even though it was many years after the war. We could hear the comings and goings in the corridor, doors slamming, phones ringing. Behind the partition walls, conversations went on late into the night; it sounded like travelling businessmen endlessly discussing their jobs. Heavy footsteps in the corridor, people carrying suitcases. And, despite the commotion, we both managed to reach the realm of silence she talked about, in which the air was lighter to breathe. After a while it felt as if we were the only people in the hotel, that everyone else had left. They had all gone to the station opposite to catch a train. The silence was so deep it made me think of the little train station in a country village near a border, lost in the snow.

  I REMEMBER AT the Mirabeau Clinic, after the accident, I woke with a start and I didn’t know where I was. I tried to find the switch for the bedside lamp. Then, in the stark light, I recognised the white walls, the bay window. I tried to fall asleep again but I was disturbed and restless. All night, people were talking on the other side of the partition. A name kept coming up, in different intonations: JACQUELINE BEAUSERGENT. In the morning I realised I had been dreaming. Only the name JACQUELINE BEAUSERGENT was real, since I had heard it from her own mouth at the Hôtel-Dieu, when the fellow in the white coat had asked us who we were.

  The other evening, at the south terminal of Orly airport, I was waiting for some friends who were coming back from Morocco. The plane was delayed. It was past ten o’clock. The large hall leading to the arrival gates was almost deserted. I had the odd feeling that I had arrived at a kind of no man’s land in space and time. Suddenly I heard one of those disembodied airport voices repeat three times: ‘WOULD JACQUELINE BEAUSERGENT PLEASE PROCEED TO DEPARTURE GATE 624.’ I ran the length of the hall. I didn’t know what had become of her in the past thirty years, but time no longer mattered. I was under the illusion that there could still be a departure gate for me. The last few passengers were making their way to gate 624, where a man in a dark uniform was standing guard. He asked sharply: ‘Do you have your ticket?’

  ‘I’m looking for someone…There was an announcement just a moment ago…Jacqueline Beausergent…’

  The last passengers had disappeared. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘She must have boarded long ago, sir.’

  ‘Are you sure? Jacqueline Beausergent…’ I repeated.

  He was blocking the way. ‘You can see very well there’s no one left, sir.’

  EVERYTHING ABOUT THE period before the accident is confused in my memory. Days merged into one another in a haze. I was waiting for the voltage to increase to see more clearly. When I think back to it now, only Hélène Navachine’s silhouette emerges from the fog. I remember she had a beauty spot on her left shoulder. She told me she was going to London for a few days because she’d been offered a job there and she was going to find out if it was really what she wanted.

  I went with her the evening she caught the train at Gare du Nord. She sent me a postcard telling me that she would soon be coming back to Paris. But she never came back. Three years ago, I received a telephone call. A woman’s voice said, ‘Hello, I’m calling from the Hôtel Palym…There is someone here who would like to speak to you, sir…’ The Hôtel Palym was almost opposite her place, in the little street from which you could see the Gare de Lyon clock. We’d taken a room there once under the names Yvette Dintillac and Patrick de Tourane. ‘Are you still on the line, sir?’ The woman said. ‘I’m putting you through…’ I was sure it would be her. Once again, we would be meeting between piano lessons and the students would play Hummel’s Bolero until the end of time. As Dr Bouvière liked to say, life is an eternal return. There was static on the line and it sounded like the murmur of wind through leaves. I waited, gripping the handset to avoid making the slightest movement that might break the thread stretching back through the years. ‘Putting you through, sir…’ I thought I heard the sound of furniture being knocked over or someone falling down the stairs.

  ‘Hello…Hello…Can you hear me?’ A man’s voice. I was disappointed. Still the interference on the line. ‘I was a friend of your father’s…Can you hear me?’ I kept saying yes, but he was the one who couldn’t hear me. ‘Guy Roussotte… My name is Guy Roussotte…Perhaps your father mentioned me…Your father and I worked together at the Bureau Otto… Can you hear me?’ He seemed to be asking the question for form’s sake without really caring if I could hear him or not. ‘Guy Roussotte…Your father and I had an office together…’ It was as if he was calling from one of those bars on the Champs-Élysées fifty years ago when the clamour of conversation revolved around black-market dealings, women and horses. His voice was becoming increasingly muffled and only fragments of sentences reached me: ‘Your father… Bureau Otto…meet…a few days at the Hôtel Palym… where I could reach him…Just tell him: Guy Roussotte… the Bureau Otto…from Guy Roussotte…a phone call… Can you hear me?…’

  How did he get my phone number? I wasn’t in the phone book. I imagined this ghost calling from a room at the Hôtel Palym, perhaps the same room that Yvette Dintillac and Patrick de Tourane stayed in one night long ago. What a strange coincidence…The voice was now too faint, and the sentences too disjointed. I wondered if it was my father he wanted to see, believing him still of this world, or if it was me. Soon after, I could no longer hear his voice. Again, the sound of a piece of furniture being knocked over or someone falling down the stairs. Then the dial tone, as if the phone had been hung up. It was already eight o’clock at night and I didn’t have the energy to call the Hôtel Palym back. I was really disappointed. I had hoped to hear Hélène Navachine’s voice. What could have become of her, after all this time? The last time I saw her in a dream, it was interrupted before she had time to give me her address and phone number.

  *

  The same winter that I heard the faraway voice of Guy Roussotte, I had an unfortunate experience. Strive as you might for over thirty years to make your life clearer and more harmonious than it was earlier on, there’s always the risk that an incident will suddenly drag you backwards. It was in December. For about a week, whenever I went out or returned home, I noticed a woman standing motionless a few metres from the door of my apartment building or on the pavement opposite. She was never there before six o’clock in the evening. A tall woman, dressed in a sheepskin coat, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a brown shoulder bag. She kept watching me as she stood there in silence. She looked menacing. From which forgotten childhood nightmare could this woman have emerged? And why now? I leaned out the window. She was waiting on the pavement, as though she was standing guard over the front of the building. But I hadn’t switched on the light in my room so she couldn’t possibly have seen me. With the big shoulder bag, hat and boots, she looked as though she had once been the canteen cook for an army that had disappeared long ago, but had left many corpses behind. I was afraid that from then on, and until the end of my life, she would be standing guard wherev
er I lived and that it would be pointless moving house. She would find my new address every time.

  One night, I came home later than usual and she was still there, motionless. I was about to push open the door of the building when she walked slowly towards me. An old woman. She stared at me harshly as if to make me ashamed of something or remind me of an error I might have made. I held her gaze in silence. I ended up wondering what I might be guilty of. I crossed my arms and said in a calm voice, articulating each syllable, that I would like to know what she wanted from me.

  She raised her chin and from her mouth came a torrent of insults. She called me by my first name and addressed me with the familiar tu. Were we somehow related? Perhaps I had known her long ago. The wide-brimmed hat accentuated the hardness of her face and, in the yellow light of the streetlamp, she looked like a very old German poseur by the name of Leni Riefenstahl. Life and emotions had left no trace on this mummy’s face, yes, the mummy of a nasty capricious little girl from eighty years ago. She kept staring at me with her raptor eyes and I didn’t look away. I gave her a big smile. It felt like she was about to bite and infect me with her venom, but beneath this aggression there was something false, like the lifeless performance of a bad actress. Again, she heaped insults on me. She was leaning against the door of the building to block my way. I kept smiling at her and realised that it was making her increasingly exasperated. But I wasn’t scared of her. Gone were the childhood terrors, in the dark, of a witch or death opening the bedroom door. ‘Could you lower your voice a little, madame?’ I said, in a courteous tone that surprised even me. She, too, seemed taken aback by the calmness of my voice. ‘Excuse me, but I’m no longer used to voices as loud as yours.’ I saw her features contract and her eyes dilate in a split second. She stuck out her chin defiantly—a very heavy, prominent chin.

  I smiled at her. Then she threw herself on me. With one hand she gripped my shoulder and with the other she tried to scratch my face. I tried to free myself, but she was really heavy. I felt my childhood terrors gradually return. For over thirty years, I had made sure that my life was as well ordered as a formal French garden. With its wide walkways, lawns and hedges, the garden had covered over a swamp where I had almost gone under long ago. Thirty years of striving. All of it just for this Medusa figure to stand in wait for me one night on the street and pounce on me…This old woman was going to suffocate me. She was as heavy as my childhood memories. I was being smothered in a shroud and it was useless to fight. No one could help me. A little further down, on the square, there was a police station, with some officers on guard duty out the front. It would all end up in a paddy wagon and a police station. It had been inevitable for a long time. Besides, at the age of seventeen, when my father had me arrested because he wanted to get rid of me, it happened around here, near the church. More than thirty years of futile striving just to come right back to where it started, in neighbourhood police stations. How sad…They looked like two drunks fighting in the street, one of the policemen would say. They would sit us on a bench, the old woman and me, like everyone who’d been caught in night round-ups, and I would have to state my name and address. They would ask me if I knew her. ‘She’s trying to pass herself off as your mother,’ the superintendent would say, ‘but according to her papers, you’re not related. And besides, your mother’s identity is unknown. You’re free to go, sir.’ It was the same superintendent my father had handed me over to when I was seventeen. Dr Bouvière was right: life is an eternal return.

  A cold rage came over me and I kneed the old woman sharply in the belly. Her grip loosened. I pushed her hard. Finally, I could breathe…I had taken her by surprise, she didn’t dare come near me again; she remained motionless, on the edge of the pavement, staring at me with her small, intense eyes. Now it was her turn to be on the defensive. She tried to smile at me, a horrible artificial smile that was at odds with the harshness of her expression. I crossed my arms. Then, seeing that the smile didn’t work on me, she pretended to wipe away a tear. At my age, how could I have been terrified of this ghost and believe for an instant that she still had the power to drag me down? That period of police stations was well and truly over.

  She was no longer standing guard over the apartment building during the days that followed and, so far, she’s given no further sign of life. But later that night, I saw her again from the window. She didn’t seem the least bit affected by our fight. She paced up and down the median strip. She went back and forth over quite a short distance, but with a lively, almost military gait. Very erect, her chin high. Every now and again she would look over at the façade of the apartment building to check if she still had an audience. And then she would begin to limp. At first she was practising as if for a rehearsal. Gradually, she found her rhythm. I watched her move off limping and then disappear, but she overplayed the part of the old canteen cook searching for a routed army.

  THREE YEARS AGO, roughly around the same time the old woman attacked me, but in June or July, I was walking along Quai de la Tournelle. A sunny Saturday afternoon. I was looking at books in the bouquinistes’ stalls. Suddenly my eyes fell upon three volumes prominently displayed and held together by a large red elastic band. The yellow cover, the author’s name and the title in black characters on the first volume gave me a pang of emotion: Screen Memories by Fred Bouvière. I removed the elastic band. Two more books by Bouvière: Drugs and Therapeutics and The Lie and the Confession. He had referred to them on several occasions during the meetings at Denfert-Rochereau. Three unobtainable books, which he said with a certain irony were his ‘early works’. Their publication dates were printed at the bottom of the covers with the name of the publisher: Au Sablier. Bouvière would have been very young then, barely twenty-two or twenty-three.

  I bought the three volumes and discovered a dedication on the flyleaf of The Lie and the Confession: ‘For Geneviève Dalame. This book was written when I was her age, during curfew hours. Fred Bouvière.’ The other two didn’t have dedications but, like the first, they bore the name ‘Geneviève Dalame’ in blue ink on the title page, with an address: 4 Boulevard Jourdan. It all came back to me: the face of the blonde girl with very pale skin, who was always in Bouvière’s shadow and sat next to him on the front seat of his car at the end of the meetings; the guy with the hawkish face saying to me in a low voice: ‘Her name is Geneviève Dalame.’ I asked the bouquiniste where he had found the books. He shrugged—Oh, someone moving house… Remembering the way Geneviève Dalame contemplated Bouvière, with her blue-eyed gaze, and hung on his every word, I thought it was impossible that she would have got rid of these three books. Unless she wanted to make a sudden break with an entire period of her life. Or she had died. Four Boulevard Jourdan. It was just around the corner from me when I was staying in Hôtel de la Rue de la Voie-Verte. But I didn’t need to check; I knew the apartment block hadn’t been there for about fifteen years and that Rue de la Voie-Verte had changed name.

  I remembered that, one day back then, I was waiting to catch the number 21 bus at Porte Gentilly and she came out of the little apartment block, but I didn’t dare approach her. She was waiting for the bus, too, and we were the only ones at the bus stop. She didn’t recognise me, which was entirely understandable: in the meetings she only had eyes for Bouvière and all the other members of the group were nothing but blurred faces in the glowing halo he projected around himself.

  When the bus started moving, we were the only passengers, and I sat on the seat opposite her. I had a clear memory of the name that the hawk had whispered in my ear a few days before. Geneviève Dalame. She was absorbed in a book covered with glassine paper, perhaps the one that Bouvière had dedicated to her and written during curfew hours. I didn’t take my eyes off her. I had read, I can’t recall where, that if you stare at someone, even from behind, they will notice your presence. With her it took a long time. She didn’t even vaguely notice me until the bus was going along Rue Glacière.

  ‘I’ve seen you in Dr Bouvière’s meeti
ngs,’ I said. By uttering his name I thought I would gain her favour, but she gave me a guarded look. I tried to think of something to say to win her over. ‘It’s crazy…’ I said, ‘Dr Bouvière answers all of life’s questions.’ And I took on a preoccupied air, as if to merely pronounce the name Bouvière was enough to detach oneself from the everyday world and from the bus we were on. She seemed reassured. We had the same guru, we shared the same rituals and the same secrets.

  ‘Have you been going to the meetings for long?’ she asked.

  ‘A few weeks.’

  ‘Would you like to have more personal contact with him?’ She asked the question with a certain condescension, as if she was the sole possible intermediary between Bouvière and the mass of disciples.

  ‘Not just yet,’ I said, ‘I’d prefer to wait a little longer…’ My tone of voice was so solemn that she could no longer doubt my sincerity.

  She smiled at me and I believe I even detected, in her big pale-blue eyes, a kind of tenderness. But I was under no illusion. I owed it all to Bouvière.

  She wore a man’s watch, which contrasted with the slenderness of her wrist. The black leather strap wasn’t tight enough. Too roughly, she stuffed her book into her bag. The watch slipped and fell off. I leaned down to pick it up. It must have been an old watch of Bouvière’s, I thought. She had asked if she could wear it so that she would always have something of his with her. I wanted to help her tighten the strap around her wrist, but it was clearly too big for her. At the base of her wrist, close to the veins, I noticed a recent scar, still pink, a row of little blisters. At first I felt uneasy. The scar didn’t fit with this sunny winter’s day, sitting on a bus with a blonde, blue-eyed girl. I was just a simple fellow with a taste for happiness and formal French gardens. Dark ideas often crossed my mind, but they were involuntary. It was perhaps the same for her, too. Her smile and her gaze suggested that before meeting Dr Bouvière, she had a carefree nature. He was probably responsible for her losing her love of life.