Such Fine Boys

by Patrick Modiano

  “Imagine, those photographers came especially for the Countess. She got herself interviewed . . . A regular movie star. She must have paid them all a bundle . . .”

  It was at that moment that I noticed, at the very back of the room, a little girl fast asleep on one of the red velvet chairs.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Pudgy.

  “The Countess’s daughter. She doesn’t seem to have much time for her. She handed her over to me for the afternoon. Except, that’s not so great for me. I have an audition to go to . . . You wouldn’t mind looking after her for me, would you?”

  “Fine by me.”

  “Just take her out for a bit of a walk and then bring her back to the Countess’s, 24 Cours Albert 1er.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m off, then. Can you imagine? They might hire me for a cabaret!”

  He was all excited and sweating profusely.

  “Break a leg, Pudge.”

  The only ones left in that makeshift theater were the sleeping little girl and me. I went up to her: her cheek was resting against the back of the chair, her left hand on her shoulder and her arm folded across her chest. She had blond ringlets and was wearing a pale blue coat with heavy brown shoes. She must have been six or seven.

  I tapped her softly on the shoulder. She opened her eyes.

  Light blue eyes, almost gray, like the Countess.

  “We have to go for a walk.”

  She got up. I took her by the hand and the two of us left the Marivaux Course.

  Following Avenue Hoche, we had arrived at the fence around the Parc Monceau.

  “Shall we go in there?”

  “Okay.”

  She nodded obediently.

  To the left, near the boulevard, I spotted swings with peeling paint, an old slide, and a concrete sandbox.

  “You want to play?”

  “Okay.”

  Nobody. Not a single child. The sky was overcast and white as cotton wool, as if it were about to snow. She took two or three turns down the slide, then asked me in a timid voice to help her onto the swing. She didn’t weigh much. I pushed the swing on which she sat very stiffly. Now and again, she looked back at me.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Martine, but my mommy calls me Jewel.”

  Someone had left a shovel in the sandbox, and she started making sand pies. Sitting on a nearby bench, I noticed that her socks were of mismatched size and color: one, dark green, stretched to her knee; the other, blue, stuck out only a few inches from the brown shoe with its untied laces. Had the Countess dressed her that day?

  I was afraid she might catch cold in the sand, and after tying her shoe I led her to the other side of the park. A few children were spinning on the merry-go-round. She chose a seat in one of the wooden swans, and the merry-go-round started up with a screech. Each time she passed by me, she raised her arm in a wave, a smile on her lips, her left hand clutching the swan’s neck.

  After five turns, I told her her mom was waiting and we should take the metro back.

  “It would be nicer to walk home.”

  “If you like.”

  I didn’t have the heart to refuse. I wasn’t even old enough to be her father.

  We headed toward the Seine via Rue Monceau and Avenue George-V. It was the time of day when the building façades still stood out against the slightly lighter sky, but soon everything would blend together in the dark. We had to hurry. As on every evening at that particular hour, I was gripped by a vague anxiety. She was too: I felt the squeeze of her hand in mine.

  From the landing outside the apartment, I heard the sounds of conversation and laughter. A brunette of about fifty, with short hair and the square, aggressive face of a bull terrier, opened the door. She looked at me suspiciously.

  “Hello, Madeleine-Louis,” the little girl said.

  “Hi, Jewel.”

  “I’ve brought . . . Jewel home,” I said.

  “Come in.”

  In the foyer, bouquets of flowers were lying on the floor, and farther in, through the half-open double doors of the living room, I could make out clusters of people.

  “Just a moment . . . I’ll get Sonia,” the woman with the terrier face said to me.

  The little girl and I waited together amid the sprays of flowers strewn around the foyer.

  “That’s a lot of flowers,” I said.

  “They’re for Mom.”

  The Countess appeared, blonde and glowing, in a black velvet suit with jet-beaded shoulders.

  “How kind of you to bring Jewel home.”

  “Oh, really . . . The least I could do . . . Congratulations . . . on your first prize.”

  “Thank you . . . Thank you . . .”

  I felt awkward and wanted to leave that apartment as quickly as possible.

  She turned to her daughter.

  “Jewel, today is a big day for your mommy, you know . . .”

  The little girl stared at her with disproportionately wide-open eyes. From astonishment or fear?

  “Jewel, Mommy got a very nice award today . . . You should give your mommy a kiss . . .”

  But as she didn’t lean down toward her daughter, the girl, standing on tiptoe, tried to kiss her in vain. The Countess didn’t even notice. She stared at the bouquets lying on the floor.

  “Jewel, do you realize . . . All those flowers . . . There are so many I’ll never be able to put them in vases . . . I have to get back to my friends . . . And take them to dinner . . . I’ll be home very late . . . You wouldn’t mind watching Jewel tonight, would you?”

  Her tone of voice indicated that this was not a question.

  “If you like,” I said.

  “They’ll make you some dinner. And you can sleep here.”

  I didn’t have a chance to answer. She bent toward Jewel.

  “Good night, Jewel darling . . . I have to go see my friends . . . Keep Mommy in your thoughts.”

  She gave her a fleeting kiss on the forehead.

  “And thank you again, Monsieur . . .”

  With a nimble stride, she went to join the others in the living room. Amid the buzz of conversation, I thought I made out the shrill sound of her laughter.

  Gradually their voices faded as they made their way down the stairs, and once more I found myself alone with Jewel. She led me to the dining room and we sat facing each other over a long, rectangular table veined to look like marble. My seat was a garden chair stained with rust, and Jewel’s a stool with a red velvet cushion for added height. No other furniture in the room. Light fell on us from a wall lamp with bare bulbs.

  A Chinese cook served us dinner.

  “Is he nice?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Chung.”

  She ate her soup conscientiously, her torso rigid.

  She remained silent throughout the meal.

  “May I get up from the table?”

  “You may.”

  She showed me her room, which had sky-blue woodwork. The only furnishings were a child’s bed and, between the two windows, a round table covered with a satin cloth on which stood a lamp.

  She slipped into the bathroom next door and I heard her brushing her teeth. When she came back, she was wearing a white nightshirt.

  “Can I have a drink of water please?”

  She had said it very fast, as if apologizing in advance.

  “Of course.”

  I went wandering in search of the kitchen, guided by a flashlight Jewel had lent me. I pictured her, holding that flashlight that was too heavy for her, alone at night, terrified by the shadows around her. Most of the rooms were empty. I tried turning on the lights as I passed by, but often the switches didn’t work. The apartment looked abandoned. On the walls, rectangular discolorations showed where paintings used to hang. In a room that must have been the Countess’s, a large bed with padded white satin posts had pride of place. A telephone on the floor and, around the bed, bunches of red roses, a
powder compact, a scarf.

  I’m not sure why, but I went rummaging through the chest of drawers and came across an old brown sheet of paper with the name and address of Odette Blache, 15 Quai du Point-du-Jour, Boulogne-sur-Seine. At the bottom were two photos, one frontal, the other in profile. I easily recognized the Countess, but she was younger, wearing a blank expression as if they were anthropometric photos.

  At the kitchen table, the Chinese cook was playing cards with another Chinese man and a redhead with pale skin.

  “I’ve come to fetch the little girl a glass of water.”

  He pointed to the sink. I filled the glass and glanced over at them. Scattered on the wax tablecloth were food ration cards. That was the ante. The door shut slowly behind me. The closer mechanism creaked.

  Again the succession of empty rooms, from which the furniture had no doubt been hastily removed not long before. To what storage place? And the white satin bed, the two chairs piled high with trunks and valises, the solitary couch against the wall bespoke a temporary setup.

  She was waiting for me in her bed.

  “Can you read me a story?”

  Once more she seemed to be apologizing as she handed me a book with a tatty cover: The Prisoner of Zenda. Strange reading for a little girl. She listened, arms folded, an expression of delight in her eyes.

  When the chapter was over, she asked me not to turn off the light, nor the chandelier in the next room. She was afraid of the dark. I poked my head through the door to see whether she was asleep. And then I wandered through the apartment, finally coming across a leather armchair in which to spend the night.

  The next day, the Countess offered me a job as tutor. Her social and artistic obligations would no longer permit her to look after Jewel. She was counting on my help. Without much regret I abandoned the Marivaux Course, in which I had enrolled mainly to combat my loneliness. Now that someone was giving me responsibilities and offering me bed and board, I felt much more sure of myself.

  I brought Jewel to a Swiss matron who gave private lessons at the Kulm School on Rue Jean-Goujon. Jewel seemed to be the only pupil at this institution, and whenever I went to pick her up, morning and afternoon, I always found her with that woman, in the back of a classroom as dark and silent as a disused chapel. The rest of the day was spent at the edge of the lawn on Cours Albert 1er or in the gardens at Trocadéro. And we walked back home along the river.

  Yes, all of that was framed by winter and night as if in a velvet box. It wasn’t only the darkness Jewel was afraid of, but also the shadows projected onto her curtains by the lamp in her room and, through the half-open doorway, the chandelier in the adjoining room.

  She saw threatening hands in them and huddled in her bed. I murmured soothing words until she fell asleep. I tried every way I could to dissipate those shadows.

  The simplest thing would have been to open the curtains, but the lamplight threatened to alert the air raid wardens. So I moved the lamp around, to the right, to the left: the shadows remained.

  My presence calmed her. After about two weeks, she had forgotten about the hands on the curtains and would fall asleep before I finished reading the nightly chapter of The Prisoner of Zenda.

  It snowed heavily that winter, and the neighborhood we lived in—Cours Albert 1er, the terrace of the modern art museum, and farther on the tiered streets on the flank of the Passy slope—looked like the ski resort at Engadine. Around Place de la Concorde, the King of the Belgians astride his horse was as white as if he’d just ridden through a blizzard. I’d found Jewel a toboggan in a junk shop, and I took her sledding down a gently sloping path in the Trocadéro gardens. In the evenings, returning via Avenue de Tokyo, I dragged the toboggan with Jewel seated on it, rigid and daydreaming as usual. I stopped short. We pretended we were lost in a forest. The idea made her laugh, and her cheeks flushed.

  At around 7 p.m., the Countess barely took the time to kiss her daughter before vanishing to some nighttime fête. The mysterious Madeleine-Louis with her boxer’s face spent all afternoon on the phone without paying us any mind. What business was that woman transacting? In a harsh voice, she made appointments at her “office,” for which she gave an address in the Arcades du Lido. Apparently she exerted a huge influence over the Countess, whom she called not Sonia but Odette, and I wondered if she wasn’t where the “money came from,” as Pudgy put it. Did she live at Cours Albert 1er? Several times I’d had the impression that she and Sonia came home together at dawn, but I believe Madeleine-Louis often slept in her “office.”

  Recently, she had acquired a houseboat, moored near the Ile de Puteaux, where we had visited her one Sunday, Jewel, the Countess, and I. She had fixed up a living room in it, with sofas and cushions to sit on. That day, her sailor’s cap and white bellbottoms made her look like a fat, ominous midshipman.

  She served tea. I recall that on one of the teakwood walls hung the photo of a friend of hers in a red frame, a chanteuse with bobbed hair, a descendant of Robert Surcouf; her songs were about ports of call, pale-colored sloops, and rain-soaked harbors.

  Was it under her sway that Madeleine-Louis had purchased the houseboat?

  When evening fell, Madeleine-Louis and the Countess left Jewel and me in the living room. I helped her with a jigsaw puzzle that I’d chosen myself, its pieces large enough not to be too difficult for her.

  The Seine was flooded that winter and the water rose almost to the portholes, fresh water whose odor of mud and lilacs filled the room.

  The two of us navigated a scape of marshlands. The farther up the river we traveled, the more I gradually reverted to her age. We drifted past the coast of Boulogne, near where I was born, between the Bois and the Seine . . .

  And that man, the one of about thirty, whom I would hear walking around two or three times a week, at night, when I was alone with Jewel . . . He had a key to the apartment and often came in through the service entrance. The first time, he introduced himself as “Jean Bori,” Sonia’s “brother”—but then, why didn’t they share the same last name?

  Madeleine-Louis had confided to me, in a smarmy voice, that the O’Dauyés—Sonia’s family—were Irish nobility who had settled in Poland in the eighteenth century. And for that matter, why was Sonia also called Odette?

  This Jean Bori, Sonia’s brother, with his thin face and pockmarked skin, seemed pleasant enough. When he arrived earlier than usual and did not have the Chinese cook serve him his dinner alone, the three of us would eat together, he, Jewel, and I. He showed the little girl an absentminded affection. Her father? He was always nicely dressed, with a tie pin. Where did he sleep at Cours Albert 1er? In Sonia’s room or on a couch in some lost corner of the apartment?

  Normally he left late, clutching an envelope that bore the words “For Jean” in Sonia’s large handwriting. He avoided Madeleine-Louis and visited when she wasn’t there.

  One evening, he wanted to stay for Jewel’s bedtime and sat at the foot of the bed to listen to the nightly reading from The Prisoner of Zenda. We each gave Jewel a good-night kiss.

  In the large, dreary room we called the salon, the Chinese cook served us two cognacs.

  “Odette is really something else . . .”

  He took a dog-eared photo from his wallet and handed it to me.

  “That was when Odette was first starting out, five years ago. She got spotted by some bigwig that evening . . . Nice picture, don’t you think?”

  Tables with white cloths. And around those tables, a large gathering of people in formal wear. An orchestra on a bandstand, way in back. The bright spotlights lit an alpine décor composed of three small chalets, a pine tree; the cardboard mountains were covered in fake snow, like the roofs of the chalets and the branches of the pine tree. Opposite the diners in their tuxedos and evening gowns, some thirty mountain infantrymen, in two rows, stood at attention, their feet in skis. The floor, too, glistened with fake snow, and I didn’t dare ask Jean Bori whether those mountain infantrymen had remained there, immobile on the
ir skis, until the end of the evening, and what had been Odette’s exact role in all this. Program vendor?

  “It was a gala . . . The ‘Ski Ball’ . . .”

  For me, that ersatz snow and winter that had marked Odette’s “debut” blended with reality. You only had to lean out the window and contemplate the snow on Cours Albert 1er.

  “Is Odette paying you enough to work as a governess?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked pensive.

  “It’s nice of you to take such good care of the kid . . .”

  Showing him out to the landing, I couldn’t help asking whether he and his sister really belonged to a family of Irish nobility that had emigrated to Poland in the eighteenth century. He appeared not to understand.

  “Who, us—Polish? Did Odette tell you that?”

  He put on his parka.

  “Yeah, sure, we’re Polish . . . Polish straight out of Porte-Dorée.”

  His laughter echoed in the stairwell while I stood frozen in the middle of the foyer.

  I walked through the empty apartment. Pockets of darkness. Rolled-up carpets. The outlines on the walls of missing paintings and furniture and bare floors, as if everything had been repossessed. And the two Chinese men were surely playing cards in the kitchen.

  She was asleep, her cheek on the pillow. A sleeping child, and someone to watch over her—that’s still something, amid all the emptiness.

  The whole thing fell apart because of an idea of Madeleine-Louis’s that Sonia thought was brilliant: Jewel should work “in show business.” If they really took her in hand, she would soon be the equal of that American child star. Sonia seemed to have given up on any sort of artistic career for herself, and I wonder whether she and Madeleine-Louis weren’t projecting their frustrated dreams onto Jewel.

  I explained to the director of the Kulm School on Rue Jean-Goujon that Jewel would no longer be attending classes there. She was very sorry about losing her only pupil, as was I, for her sake and for Jewel’s.

  We had to create a wardrobe for her, in preparation for the photos to send to the production companies. They made her a horse riding outfit, a skating outfit like Sonja Henie’s, and one for a model little girl. Her mother and Madeleine-Louis brought her to endless fittings, and from the window I watched Sonia’s buggy leave Cours Albert 1er in the snow, its black top folded down. I felt a pang in my heart. The little girl was squeezed between her mother and Madeleine-Louis, and the latter cracked a whip over the horse, like a circus tamer.