Out of the Dark

by Patrick Modiano

  Is it a heavy suitcase?’ I asked her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because I don’t know if it would be better to take a taxi or the métro.’

  She seemed amazed that I wasn’t expressing any misgivings.

  ‘It doesn’t bother you to do this for me?’

  She probably wanted to add that I would be in no danger, but I didn’t need encouraging. To tell the truth, ever since my childhood, I had seen my father carrying so many bags –suitcases with false bottoms, leather satchels or overnight bags, even those black briefcases that gave him a false air of respectability…. And I never knew just what was in them.

  ‘It will be a pleasure,’ I told her.

  She smiled. She thanked me, adding that she would never again ask me to do anything like this. I was a little disappointed that Van Bever was involved, but there was nothing else at all that bothered me about it. I was used to suitcases.

  Standing in the doorway of her room, she gave me the key and kissed me.

  I ran down the stairs and quickly crossed the quai in the direction of the Pont de la Tournelle, hoping not to meet up with Cartaud.

  In the mdtro, it was still rush hour. I felt at ease there, squeezed in with the other travelers. There was no risk of drawing attention to myself.

  When I came back with the suitcase, I would definitely take the métro.

  I waited to switch to the Miromesnil line in the Havre–Caumartin station. I had plenty of time. Jacqueline wouldn’t call me at the hotel before ten o’clock. I let two or three trains go by. Why had she sent me on this mission rather than Van Bever? And had she really told him I would be going after the suitcase? With her, you never knew.

  Coming out of the métro I was feeling apprehensive, but that soon faded. There were only a few other pedestrians in the street, and the windows of the buildings were dark: offices whose occupants had just left for the day. When I came to number 160 I looked up. Only the fifth-floor windows were lit.

  I crossed the lobby in the dark. The elevator climbed slowly and the yellow light of the ceiling lamp over my head cast the shadow of the grillwork onto the stairway wall. I left the elevator door ajar to give me light as I slipped the key into the lock.

  Around the vestibule, the double doors of the rooms were all wide open, and there was a white glow coming from the streetlights on the boulevard. I turned to the left and stepped into the dentist’s office. Standing in the middle of the room, the chair with its reclining leather back made a sort of elevated couch where you could stretch out if you liked.

  By the light from the street I opened the metal cabinet, the one that stood near the windows. The suitcase was there, on a shelf, a simple tinplate suitcase like the ones soldiers on leave carry.

  I took the suitcase and found myself back in the vestibule. Opposite the dentist’s office, a waiting room. I flipped the switch. Light fell from a crystal chandelier. Green velvet armchairs. On a coffee table, piles of magazines. I crossed the waiting room and entered a little bedroom with a narrow bed, left unmade. I turned on the bedside lamp.

  A pajama top lay on the pillow, crumpled into a ball. Hanging in the closet, two suits, the same color gray and the same cut as the one Cartaud was wearing in the cate on the Rue Cujas. And beneath the window, a pair of brown shoes, with shoe trees.

  So this was Cartaud’s bedroom. In the wicker wastebasket I noticed a pack of Royales, the cigarettes Jacqueline smoked. She must have thrown it away the other night when she was here with him.

  Without thinking, I opened the nightstand drawer, in which boxes of sleeping pills and aspirin were piled up next to a stack of business cards bearing the name Pierre Robbes, dental surgeon, 160 Boulevard Haussmann, Wagram 1318.

  The suitcase was locked and I hesitated to force it. It wasn’t heavy. It was probably full of banknotes. I went through the pockets of the suits and finally found a black billfold holding an identity card, dated a year earlier, in the name of Pierre Cartaud, bom 15 June 1923 in Bordeaux (Gironde), address 160 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris.

  So Cartaud had been living here for at least a year…. And this was also the address of the person known as Pierre Robbes, dental surgeon. It was too late to question the concierge, and I couldn’t very well appear at his door with this tinplate suitcase in my hand.

  I had sat down on the edge of the bed. I could smell ether, and I felt a sudden pang, as if Jacqueline had just left the room.

  On my way out of the building I decided to knock on the glass door of the concierge’s office, where a light was on. A dark-haired man, not very tall, opened it a crack and put his head out. He looked at me suspiciously.

  ‘I’d like to see Dr. Robbes,’ I told him.

  ‘Dr. Robbes isn’t in Paris at the moment.’

  ‘Do you have any idea how I could get in touch with him?’

  He seemed more and more suspicious, and his gaze lingered on the tinplate suitcase I was carrying.

  ‘Don’t you have his address?’

  ‘I can’t give it to you, monsieur. I don’t know who you are.’

  ‘I’m a relative of Dr. Robbes. I’m doing my military service, and I have a few days’ leave.’

  That seemed to reassure him a little.

  ‘Dr. Robbes is at his house in Behoust.’

  I couldn’t quite make out the name. I asked him to spell it forme: BEHOUST.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But I thought Dr. Robbes had moved away. There’s another name on the list of tenants.’

  And I pointed at it, and Cartaud’s name.

  ‘He’s a colleague of Dr. Robbes.…’

  I saw the wariness come back into his face. He said:

  ‘Good-bye, monsieur.’

  And he quickly closed the door behind him. Outside, I decided to walk to the mltro stop at the Gare Saint-Lazare. The suitcase really wasn’t heavy at all. The boulevard was deserted, the faccedil;ades of the buildings were dark, and from time to dme a car passed by, headed for the Place de l’Étoile. It might have been a mistake to knock on the concierge’s door, since he would be able to give my description. I reassured myself with the thought that no one –not Cartaud, not the ghostly Dr. Robbes, not the concierge of number 160 –could touch me. Yes, what I had done –entering a strange apartment and taking a suitcase that didn’t belong to me, an act that for someone else could be quite serious –was of no consequence for me.

  I didn’t want to go back to the Quai de la Tournelle right away. I climbed the stairs in the train station and came out into the huge lobby known as the Salle des Pas Perdus. There were still many people heading toward the platforms of the suburban lines. I sat down on a bench with the suitcase between my legs. Little by little I began to feel as though I too were a traveler or a soldier on leave. The Gare Saint-Lazare offered me an escape route that extended far beyond the suburbs or the province of Normandy, where these trains were headed. Buy a ticket for Le Havre, Cartaud’s town. And from Le Havre, disappear anywhere, anywhere in the world, through the Porte Océane…

  Why did they call this the Salle des Pas Perdus, the room of lost steps? It probably took only a little time here before nothing meant anything anymore, not even your footsteps.

  I walked to the buffet restaurant at the far end of the lobby. There were two soldiers sitting on the terrace, each with a suitcase identical to mine. I nearly asked them for the little key to their suitcases so that I could try to open the one I was carrying. But I was afraid that once it was open the bundles of banknotes it contained would be visible to everyone around me, and particularly to one of the plainclothes officers I had heard about: the station police. Those two words made me think of Jacqueline and Van Bever, as if they had dragged me into an affair that would expose me to the menace of the station police for the rest of my life.

  I went into the buffet restaurant and decided to sit down at one of the tables near the bay windows overlooking the Rue d’Amsterdam. I wasn’t hungry. I ordered a grenadine. I kept the suitcase clasped between my le
gs. There was a couple at the next table speaking in quiet voices. The man was dark-haired, in his thirties, with pockmarked skin over his cheekbones. He hadn’t taken off his overcoat. The woman also had dark hair and was wearing a fur coat. They were finishing their dinner. The woman was smoking Royales, like Jacqueline. Sitting next to them, a fat black briefcase and a leather suitcase of the same color. I wondered if they had just arrived in Paris or if they were about to leave. The woman said in a more audible voice:

  ‘We could just take the next train.’

  ‘When is it?’

  ‘Ten fifteen.’

  ‘OK,’ said the man.

  They were looking at each other in an odd way. Ten fifteen. That was about when Jacqueline would call me at the hotel on the Quai de la Tournelle.

  The man paid the check and they stood up. He picked up the black briefcase and the suitcase. They passed by my table, but they took no notice of me at all.

  The waiter leaned down toward me.

  ‘Have you decided?’

  He was pointing at the menu.

  ‘This section is reserved for diners…. I can’t serve you just a drink….’

  ‘I’m waiting for someone,’ I told him.

  Through the bay window I suddenly saw the man and the woman, on the sidewalk of the Rue d’Amsterdam. He had taken her arm. They walked into a hotel, just a little down the street.

  The waiter came back to my table.

  ‘You’ll have to make up your mind, monsieur… my shift is ending….’

  I looked at my watch. Eight fifteen. I wanted to stay where I was rather than wander around outside in the cold, and I ordered the special. Rush hour was over. They’d all taken their trains to the suburbs.

  Down below, on the Rue d’Amsterdam, there was a crowd behind the windows of the last café before the Place de Budapest. The light there was yellower and murkier than in the Café Dante. I used to wonder why all these people came and lost themselves in the area around the Gare Saint–Lazare, until I learned that this was one of the lowest areas of Paris. They slid here down a gende slope. The couple who had been here a moment ago didn’t fight the slope. They had let the time of their train go by, to end up in a room with black curtains like the H6tel de Lima, but with dirtier wallpaper and sheets rumpled by the people who had been there before them. Lying on the bed, she wouldn’t even take off her fur coat.

  I finished eating. I put the suitcase on the seat next to me. I picked up my knife and tried to fit the end of it into the lock, but the hole was too small. The lock was attached to the suitcase by bolts, which I could have pulled out if I’d had some pliers. Why bother? I would wait until I was with Jacqueline in the room on the Quai de la Tournelle.

  I could also leave town on my own and lose contact with her and Van Bever forever. My only good memories up to now were memories of escape.

  I thought of cutting a sheet of paper into little squares. On each of the squares, I would write a name and a place:

  Jacqueline

  Van Bever

  Cartaud

  Dr. Robbes

  160 Boulevard Haussmann, third floor

  Hótel de la Tournelle, 65 Quai de la Tournelle

  Hótel de Lima, 46 Boulevard Saint-Germain

  Le Cujas, 22 Rue Cujas

  Café Dante

  Forges-les-Eaux, Dieppe, Bagnolles-de-POme, Enghien,

  Luc-sur-Mer, Langrune

  Le Havre

  Athis-Mons

  I would shuffle the papers like a deck of cards and lay them out on the table. So this was my life? So my whole existence at this moment came down to about twenty unconnected names and addresses that had nothing in common but me? And why these rather than others? What did I have to do with these names and places? I was in one of those dreams where you know you can wake up at any time, whenever things turn threatening. If I liked, I could walk away from this table and it would all come undone; everything would disappear into emptiness. There would be nothing left but a tinplate suitcase and a few scraps of paper on which someone had scrawled names and places that no longer meant anything to anyone.

  I crossed the Salle des Pas Perdus again, almost deserted now, and walked toward the platforms. I looked at the big board overhead to find the destination of the 10:15 train the couple that had been sitting next to me would take: LE HAVRE. I began to think that none of these trains went anywhere at all, and that we were condemned to wander from the buffet to the Salle des Pas Perdus and from there to the commercial gallery and the surrounding streets. One more hour to kill. I stopped by a telephone booth near the suburban lines. Should I go back to 160 Boulevard Haussmann and leave the suitcase where I’d found it? That way everything would be restored to normal and I would have nothing on my conscience. I looked at the phone book in the booth, because I had forgotten Dr. Robbes’s number. It rang again and again. There was no one in the apartment. Should I call this Dr. Robbes in Behoust and make a full confession? And where might Jacqueline and Cartaud be right now? I hung up. I decided to keep the suitcase and bring it back to Jacqueline, since that was the only way to stay in contact with her.

  I leafed through the phone book. The streets of Paris passed by before my eyes, along with the addresses of buildings and the names of their occupants. I came across SAINT-LAZARE (Gare), and I was surprised to find that there were names there as well:

  Railway Police Lab 28 42

  WAGONS-LITS Eur 44 46

  CAFÉ ROME Eur 48 30

  HOTEL TERMINUS Eur 36 80

  Porters’ Cooperative Eur 58 77

  Gabrielle Debrie, florist, Salle des Pas Perdusm Commercial Gallery: Lab 02 47

  1. Bernois Eur 45 66

  5. Biddeloo et Dilley Mmes Eur 42 48

  Geo Shoes Eur 44 63

  CINÉAC Lab 80 74

  19. Bourgeois (Renée) Eur 35 20

  25. Stop private mail service Eur 45 96

  25bis. Nono-Nanette Eur 42 62

  27. Discobolos (The) Eur 41 43

  Was it possible to get in touch with these people? Was Renée Bourgeois still somewhere in the station at this hour? Behind the glass of one of the waiting rooms, I could see only a man in an old brown overcoat, slumped on one of the benches, asleep, with a newspaper sticking out of the pocket of his overcoat. Bernois?

  I climbed the central staircase and entered the commercial gallery. All the shops were closed. I could hear the sound of diesel engines coming from the taxi stand in the Cour d’Amsterdam. The commercial gallery was very brightly lit, and I was suddenly afraid I might run into one of the agents of the ‘Railway Police,’ as they were listed in the phone book. He would ask me to open the suitcase and I would have to run. They would have no trouble catching me, and they would drag me into their office in the station. It was too stupid.

  I entered the Cinlac and paid my two francs fifty at the ticket counter. The usherette, a blonde with short hair, wanted to lead me to the front rows with her little flashlight, but I preferred to sit in the back. The newsreel pictures were passing by, and the narrator provided a commentary in a grating voice that was very familiar to me: that same voice, for more than twenty-five years. I had heard it the year before at the Cinéma Bonaparte, which was showing a montage of old newsreels.

  I had set the suitcase on the seat to my right. I counted seven separate silhouettes in front of me, seven people alone. The theater was filled with that warm smell of ozone that hits you when you walk over a subway grating. I hardly glanced at the pictures of the week’s events. Every fifteen minutes these same pictures would appear on the screen, timeless, like that piercing voice, which sounded to me as if it could have been produced through some sort of prosthesis.

  The newsreel went by a third time, and I looked at my watch. Nine thirty. There were only two silhouettes left in front of me. They were probably asleep. The usherette was sitting near the entrance on a little seat that folded out from the wall. I heard the seat clack. The beam from her flashlight swept over the row of seats where I was sitting
but on the other side of the aisle. She was showing a young man in uniform to his seat. She turned off her flashlight and they sat down together. I overheard a few words of their conversation. He would be taking the train for Le Havre as well. He would try to be back in Paris in two weeks. He would call to let her know the exart date of his return. They were quite close to me. Only the aisle separated us. They were talking out loud, as if they didn’t know I and the two sleeping silhouettes in front of us were here. They stopped talking. They were squeezed together, and they were kissing. The grating voice was still discussing the images on the screen: a parade of striking workers, a foreign statesman’s motorcade passing through Paris, bombings… I wished that voice would fell silent forever. The thought that it would go on just as it was, commenting on future catastrophes without the slightest hint of compassion, sent a shiver down my spine. Now the usherette was straddling her companion’s knees. She was moving rhythmically above him, and the springs were squeaking. And soon her sighs and moans drowned out the commentator’s quavering voice.

  In the Cour de Rome, I looked through my pockets to see if I had enough money left. Ten francs. I could take a taxi. That would be much faster than the mltro: I would have had to change at the Opéra station and carry the suitcase through the corridors.

  The driver got out to put the suitcase in the trunk, but I wanted to keep it with me. We drove down the Avenue de l’Opéra and followed the quais. Paris was deserted that night, like a city I was about to leave forever. Once I was at the Quai de la Tournelle, I was afraid I’d lost the key to the room, but it was in one of my raincoat pockets after all.

  I walked past the little reception counter and asked the man who usually sat there until midnight if anyone had called for room 3. He answered no, but it was only ten to ten.