Such Fine Boys

by Patrick Modiano

  “So long, everybody . . . I won’t be able to bring Martine home this evening. I’ll leave that to you . . .”

  Even his voice had changed. It had grown guttural.

  “Are you going to Gaillon’s tonight?” asked Winegrain.

  “If the American drops off to sleep quick enough.”

  “If you do, play a hand for me.”

  Winegrain handed him a wad of cash. Da Silva counted it after moistening his finger with spit.

  “Hope Lady Luck’s with me tonight. Ciao!”

  He spun on his heels with the self-conscious movement of a lounge dancer and left the room. After a moment, we heard the Lancia start up.

  “And now it’s time for the three of us to talk,” said Winegrain, leaning toward us. “I’m depending on you to warn Martine . . . That guy’s not Brazilian, and he’s no millionaire . . .”

  He let out a strangled little laugh.

  “I met him when he worked in the bowling alley at Porte Maillot. Now he’s a chauffeur. Next thing you know . . .”

  Yvon had hung his head as if he didn’t want to hear any of this.

  “He calls himself da Silva, but his real name is Richard Mouliade . . . Mouliade . . . Mou-li-ade . . .”

  That name, with its liquid sounds, made me feel queasy. It was like a whirlpool of silt, sucking in an entire body.

  “Not only that, but he’s got a record. He’s really bad news for Martine . . .”

  Again that strangled laugh. The floor was falling away under me. The room tilted and pitched. I was feeling very queasy. The wind swelled the tablecloth from underneath and I looked for something stable I could hold on to. My eyes latched on to a huge, unlit chandelier just above our heads, its prisms shining with drab brilliance.

  “What can you do, the girl’s in love,” Winegrain muttered.

  IX.

  In autumn, we spent Monday afternoons doing what Mr. Jeanschmidt called “gardening”: raking up the dead leaves from the lawns, the whole class in a row, working our way backward behind Pedro. And then we loaded the piles of leaves onto wheelbarrows that we went to dump in a vacant lot next to the changing hut.

  One evening in May, during recess, Pedro had come upon me staring at the leaves on the large plane tree at the edge of the lawn.

  “What are you thinking about, son?”

  “The leaves we’re going to have to rake up next fall, sir.”

  He knitted his brow.

  “They’re like students,” Pedro answered gravely. “The old ones go, new ones come. The new ones turn old, and on and on . . . Just like the leaves.”

  I wondered then whether he kept any souvenirs, old report cards, old homework, from all those leaves that reappeared year after year.

  Naturally, several “old ones” remained alive through school lore: Johnny, for instance, whose name was etched into one of the lockers in the changing hut, with its odor of wet wood, next to which we emptied our wheelbarrows in the fall . . . Pedro had told us the story of Johnny so many times that I felt as if I knew him as well as my actual classmates.

  Whenever I think of Johnny, I picture him in his grandmother’s apartment on Avenue du Général-Balfourier. Someone must have been looking after the place in her absence, as there was no dust on the furniture and the parquet floors shone so brightly that Johnny, feeling intimidated, walked on eggshells.

  In late afternoon, the sun drew a large, sand-colored rectangle in the middle of the carpet. The light coated the walls and bookshelves in gauze, like the slipcovers people drape over furniture in unused apartments. Sitting on the sofa, Johnny stretched out his leg, and the shoe on his right foot reached the center of the bright spot on the carpet. Not moving, he pondered the sunlight glancing off the black leather, and soon it felt as if the shoe were no longer connected to his body. A shoe abandoned for all eternity inside a rectangle of light. Gradually darkness fell. They had shut off the electricity, and as twilight slowly invaded the apartment he felt more and more anxious. Why had he stayed in Paris all alone? What made him do it? No doubt the numbness and paralysis of nightmares, when one is trying to flee danger or hop a train . . .

  And yet, the weather in Paris was beautiful that year, and Johnny had turned twenty-two. His real name was Kurt, but for years they had called him Johnny because of his likeness to Johnny Weissmuller, the swimmer and movie star he admired. Johnny was particularly good at skiing, the fine points of which he had learned from instructors in St. Anton, when he and his grandmother still lived in Austria. He wanted to become a professional skier.

  He even thought he was following in Weissmuller’s footsteps the day he was offered a walk-on part in a mountaineering film. Sometime after it was shot, he and his grandmother had left Austria because of the Anschluss. In France, he was enrolled in the Valvert School, and had remained there until the war broke out.

  Now, every evening at around eight-thirty, he left his grandmother’s empty apartment and took the metro to Passy. The elevated station was like the tiny depot of a winter resort or the last stop of a funicular. Descending the stairs, he reached the buildings lower down, near the Square de l’Alboni, in that tiered section of Passy reminiscent of Monte Carlo.

  On the top floor of one of those buildings lived a woman fifteen years his senior, a certain Arlette d’Alwyn, whom he had met in April in a café on Avenue Delessert. She had told him she was married to a fighter pilot, from whom she hadn’t had word since the start of the war. She thought he might be in Syria or London. Prominently displayed at the edge of the nightstand was a garnet leather frame containing the photo of a handsome, dark-haired man: pencil mustache, aviator’s uniform. But the photo looked like a movie still. And why was only her name, Arlette d’Alwyn, engraved on the copper plaque on the door of the apartment?

  She gave him a key to her place, and in the evening, when he entered the living room, she was stretched out on the divan, nude beneath her dressing gown. She was playing a record. She was blonde, with green eyes and very soft skin, and even though she was fifteen years older, she looked as young as Johnny, with something dreamy and vaporous about her. But she had a temper.

  She arranged to see him at 9 p.m. She wasn’t free during the day, and he had to leave her apartment very early in the morning. He was curious about how she spent her time, but she eluded his questions. One evening, he had arrived shortly before her and rifled haphazardly through a chest of drawers, where he found a receipt from the pawnshop on Rue Pierre-Charron. That was how he learned she had hocked a ring, a pin, and some earrings, and for the first time he caught a slight whiff of ruin in that apartment, a bit like at his grandmother’s. Was it the smell of opiates that impregnated the furniture, the bed, the record player, the empty shelves, and the photo of the supposed fighter pilot framed in garnet-colored leather?

  His situation was difficult, too. He had not left Paris in two years, since the month of May 1940, when he had brought his grandmother to Saint-Nazaire. She had taken the last boat for America, and tried to persuade him to go with her. Their visas were in order. He had said he preferred to stay in France, that he was in no danger. Before departure time, the two of them had sat on a bench in the little square near the docks.

  In Paris, he had tried to reconnect with former classmates from the Valvert School. No luck. Then he had haunted the various film studios, looking for work as an extra, but he needed a guild card and they weren’t issuing any to Jews, much less to foreign Jews like him. He had gone to the Racing Club to see whether they needed a gymnastics trainer. Waste of time. He thought of spending the winter in a ski resort, where he might secure a job as an instructor. But since they were in the Unoccupied Zone, how could he get there?

  By chance he came across a want ad: they were looking for people to model Morreton hats. They hired him. He posed in a studio on Boulevard Delessert, and it was after work one day that he had met Arlette d’Alwyn. They photographed him head-on, in profile, in three-quarter view, each time wearing a Morreton hat of a different
style or color. That line of work required what the photographer called a “good mug,” as a hat accentuates the face’s defects. You need a straight nose, a well-formed chin, and nicely arched brows—all qualities he possessed. It had lasted a month and then they’d let him go.

  After that, he had sold off some furniture from the apartment on Avenue du Général-Balfourier, where he’d lived with his grandmother. He went through moments of depression and anxiety. Nothing good could happen in this city. He felt trapped. All things considered, he should have gone to America.

  At first, to keep his spirits up, he resumed his habit of a rigorous exercise routine. Every morning, he went to the Deligny public pool, or to the Bérétrot pool in Joinville-le-Pont. He swam the crawl and the breaststroke for an hour. But soon he felt so isolated among those indifferent men and women, with their sunbathing and paddleboating, that he stopped going to Deligny or Joinville altogether.

  He rested indoors on Avenue du Général-Balfourier, and at eight o’clock he would go out to see Arlette d’Alwyn.

  Why, on certain evenings, did he put off his departure? He would gladly have remained alone in the empty apartment with its closed shutters. Back when, his grandmother used to scold him gently for being distracted and uncommunicative, for lacking in “social skills” and not taking care of himself, such as always going out in the rain or snow without a coat: “in shirtsleeves,” as she put it. But by now, it was too late to fix this. One day, he didn’t feel up to leaving Avenue du Général-Balfourier. The next evening, he had shown up at Arlette d’Alwyn’s tousled and unkempt, and she said she’d been worried about him and that such a handsome, distinguished young man oughtn’t let himself go like that.

  The air was so warm and the night so clear that they left the windows open. They set out the velvet cushions from the divan in the middle of the small balcony and lay there until very late. On the top floor of a neighboring building, on a balcony like theirs, stood several people whose laughter they could hear.

  Johnny was still nurturing his idea about winter sports. Arlette was not very familiar with the mountains. She had been to Sestrières once and remembered it fondly. Why not go there together? As for Johnny, he was thinking about Switzerland.

  Another time, the evening was warm and he decided not to get off at the Passy stop, as he usually did, but at Trocadéro. He would walk to Arlette’s via the gardens and the Quai de Passy.

  He reached the top of the metro stairs and saw a cordon of police standing guard on the sidewalk. They asked to see his papers. He didn’t have any. They shoved him into a police van a bit farther on, which already contained a dozen other shadowy figures.

  It was one of the roundups that, in the past few months, had routinely preceded convoys to the East.

  X.

  Every two weeks, at evening study hall, one of our teachers would announce our “categories.” Pedro had decided on these during a teachers’ meeting. Category A meant very good work, and B, passable work. Category C was reserved for those who had committed disciplinary infractions and lost their exit privileges.

  On Saturday mornings, we assembled behind the Castle, in a fallow field with a lone Lebanese cedar. Pedro called the roll of C’s and, one by one, the unfortunates went to stand in a row at the edge of the field. The C’s would spend Saturday and Sunday at the school doing yard work and marching in quickstep along the paths.

  Some of the A’s and B’s waited for their parents to come, but most of us climbed into the two Chausson buses that had idled in front of the Castle since nine-thirty. When everyone was seated, the two buses jerked into motion and, one following the other, rolled slowly down the drive. After the main gate, they turned onto the highway. Then all the students, older and younger, struck up campfire songs or barracks ditties in chorus.

  My classmate Christian Portier and I never sang those songs, and perhaps that was why we got along so well. We always sat next to each other on the bus. For several months, on our Saturdays and Sundays out, we were inseparable.

  Christian’s mother came to collect us at the bus stop at Porte de Saint-Cloud, and the image of Mme Portier—Claude Portier—waiting for us at the wheel of her Renault convertible, cigarette dangling from her lips, has remained indelibly etched in my memory.

  She smoked Royales. With graceful movements, she pulled the red cigarette pack from her handbag. The click of her bag as it snapped shut, the breath of perfume it exhaled. The smell of her Royales—that bitter, slightly sickening odor of French blond tobacco . . . She was on the small side, with light brown hair and gray eyes, and her cheekbones, stubborn forehead, and short nose gave her face a catlike quality. She looked just like the movie actress Yvette Lebon. Moreover, early in our friendship, Christian had me convinced that he was the son of Yvette Lebon, and when I first met his mother he gestured toward her ceremoniously and said:

  “Allow me to introduce Yvette Lebon.”

  It must have been their private joke, or a way for Christian to show her off. She had probably mentioned the resemblance years before, when Christian was too young to know who Yvette Lebon was. Perhaps she had even taught him the phrase, “Allow me to introduce Yvette Lebon,” and he repeated his lesson, uncomprehending, to the delight of Mme Portier’s friends. Yes, I could easily imagine Christian, with his big head and prematurely deep voice, as his mother’s pageboy.

  Those Saturdays, when the bus brought us from the Valvert School to Paris, we arrived at Porte de Saint-Cloud at around noon, and Mme Portier took us to lunch in a restaurant near the bus stop. A wide balcony with a copper railing, and a dining room below. We sat at a table on the balcony, Mme Portier and her son next to each other, me facing them.

  Mme Portier ate like a bird: she ordered a hard-boiled egg, grapefruit . . . Christian looked at her sternly and said:

  “Claude, you really should eat something.”

  He called her by her first name, and at first I had been surprised to hear this fifteen-year-old gently bossing his mother around.

  “Claude, that’s your fifth cigarette . . . Give me the pack, right now.”

  He plucked the cigarette from her mouth, stubbed it out, and confiscated her pack of Royales. Mme Portier bowed her head submissively and smiled.

  “Claude, I think you’ve lost more weight. You’re not being sensible.”

  His mother looked straight back at him, and soon, like two children having a staring contest, they burst out laughing. They were playing it up for my benefit.

  Every other Saturday, Mme Portier didn’t come to pick us up at Porte de Saint-Cloud; she would send a telegram to Valvert the evening before to let us know. She was sleeping in after having stayed up all night playing poker. On those Saturdays, we got into the habit of waking her at three in the afternoon with breakfast in bed.

  There was never any mention of a “Mr. Portier,” and I wondered whether Christian had a father. Finally, one Sunday evening when we were back in school, he opened up to me, speaking in a low voice so as not to wake our bunkmates. We leaned against the windowsill, and the great lawn below shone pale green in the moonlight. No, his mother had never been married and had kept her maiden name, Portier. He, Christian, was a love child. His father? A Greek, whom Claude had known in Paris during the Occupation. He now lived in Brazil, and Christian had seen him only two or three times in his life.

  I wanted to know more about this mysterious Greek, but I didn’t dare ask Mme Portier.

  In the afternoon, Claude took Christian shopping, and I went with them. One Saturday, we went to pick up Mme Portier’s present for her son’s fifteenth birthday, a flannel suit. It was November or December and already growing dark. Mme Portier guided us through a run-down apartment on Rue du Colisée, as if she knew the place well. A huge space, desk lamps fastened to long tables, fabric samples, a fireplace, a mirrored armoire, a leather sofa. The tailor, a man of about sixty with chubby cheeks and muttonchops, greeted us and kissed Mme Portier’s hand, but with a certain familiarity.

&nbs
p; Christian was excited to try on his first suit. The tailor lit a neon tube at the top of one of the mirrors on the armoire, then opened the two side doors. And my friend, reflected from every angle, stood up straight in his “dark flannel” and blinked, dazzled by the bright neon glare.

  “What’s your verdict, young man?”

  The tailor spun him around, pushing his shoulder, and examined the trouser pleats.

  “And you, my dear, are you pleased with your son’s first suit?”

  “Very pleased,” said Mme Portier. “As long as there’s no vest.”

  “Someday you’ll have to explain to me your aversion to vests.”

  “Nothing to explain . . . I’ve always found men who sported vests or chinstrap beards ridiculous.”

  She grabbed me by the wrist.

  “Take my advice: if you want women like me to like you, never wear a vest . . . or grow a chinstrap beard.”

  “Don’t listen to my mother,” said Christian. “She sometimes gets these absurd notions . . .”

  The tailor had taken a step back and his gaze caressed Christian’s suit.

  “The young man has almost exactly the same measurements as his father. You know, I found an old index card on your father . . .”

  Mme Portier knitted her brow slightly.

  “What a memory you have, dear Elston!”

  Christian came forward in his suit.

  “Perhaps you could give me the card. To remember him by.”

  But he had said it without conviction. He walked toward the fitting room at the other end of the space, gingerly, like a tightrope walker on his wire. Perhaps he was afraid of getting a splinter in his foot.