Such Fine Boys
Page 14
“Try as I might, I can’t think of a good way to get rid of him. I’ve made two attempts. First with my car. One night, he was taking a walk outside and I nearly ran him over . . . like an accident . . . It was idiotic.”
He was watching for a reaction from me, an opinion. I nodded inanely.
“The second time, we were walking on the boulders around Batz-sur-Mer, a few miles from here. I was going to push him off . . . And then at the last minute I lost my nerve. What do you make of all this?”
“I don’t quite know what to say,” I told him.
“Anyway, I wouldn’t be taking much of a risk. I’ll have Françoise and her mother’s testimony to back me up. We often talk about it, the three of us. They think the best way would be to take him on another walk in Batz . . .”
My gaze rested on the old man a short distance away, who had refolded his newspaper and taken a pipe from his pocket, which he was filling slowly. What was his name, Grout de l’Ain? I felt like shouting it out to see if he’d look over. The little girl, her books under her arm, a radiant smile on her face, came back to sit at our table.
I was puzzled. That fog from fifteen years ago still clung to Marc Newman. His art of not answering precise questions. But I also remembered his sudden bouts of talkativeness, like jets of steam under a heavy lid. How could one ever know with him? Condriatseff.
Vague thoughts crossed my mind, on the sidewalk of that café, in the sun, while a breeze swelled the orange-and-white-striped tents and ruffled our play poster on the ship’s mast. I said to myself that our school had left us completely unprepared for life.
She was showing Newman the pictures in Applekins, and he, leaning over her shoulder, was turning the pages of the booklet. Now and again, she raised her face toward Marc and smiled. She seemed very fond of him.
XIV.
It’s a night unlike any other. I caught the last train, the eleven-forty-three. Charell is waiting for me on the platform. We walk through the lobby with its closed ticket windows, then the traffic circle in front of the station, the one I used to ride around on a bike with Martine and Yvon.
We enter the street, taking the sidewalk that runs along the public park. On the other side, a warm breeze caresses the ivy at the Robin des Bois inn, its bar still lit at this late hour. Charell goes in to buy a pack of cigarettes. But no one is there.
We resume our walk. On the left, beneath the concrete balcony, the brown doors of the cinema with their portholes. An avenue bordered by linden trees rises toward Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, where Martine and Yvon lived. The bus stop. After so many years, Bordin’s catchphrase comes to mind:
“A giovedí, amici miei . . .”
The railroad crossing. Town hall. And pensive Oberkampf in his bronze frock coat. He’s the only resident left. We hear the flow of the Bièvre waterfall, under the bridge.
The main gate is left ajar. The driveway stretches before us, but we hesitate. Gradually, in that nocturnal northern light, appear the infirmary, the flagpole, and the trees.
The two of us enter. We don’t dare venture farther than the large plane tree.
The grass glows with a pale green phosphorescence. It was there, at that spot on the lawn, that we waited for Pedro’s whistle to start the match. We were such fine boys.
PATRICK MODIANO, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1945, and published his first novel, La Place de l’Etoile, in 1968. In 1978, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for Rue des Boutiques Obscures (published in English as Missing Person), and in 1996 he received the Grand Prix National des Lettres for his body of work. Modiano’s other writings in English translation include Suspended Sentences, Pedigree: A Memoir, After the Circus, Paris Nocturne, Little Jewel, and Sundays in August (all published by Yale University Press), as well as the memoir Dora Bruder, the screenplay Lacombe Lucien, and the novels So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood, Young Once, In the Café of Lost Youth, and The Black Notebook.
MARK POLIZZOTTI has translated more than forty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, Jean Echenoz, and Raymond Roussel. A Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the recipient of a 2016 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, he is the author of Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the collaborative novel S., Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, and Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, the Nation, Parnassus, Partisan Review, Bookforum, and elsewhere. He directs the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.