Sleep of Memory

by Patrick Modiano

  Sleep of Memory

  English translations of works by Patrick Modiano

  From Yale University Press

  After the Circus

  Little Jewel

  Paris Nocturne

  Pedigree: A Memoir

  Sleep of Memory

  Such Fine Boys

  Sundays in August

  Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas (Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin)

  Also available

  The Black Notebook

  Catherine Certitude

  Dora Bruder

  Honeymoon

  In the Café of Lost Youth

  Lacombe, Lucien

  Missing Person

  The Occupation Trilogy (The Night Watch, Ring Roads, and La Place de l’Etoile)

  Out of the Dark

  So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood

  Villa Triste

  Young Once

  Sleep of Memory

  Patrick Modiano

  Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti

  The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.

  English translation copyright © 2018 by Mark Polizzotti.

  Originally published as Souvenirs dormants. © Editions GALLIMARD, Paris, 2017. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale.edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup.co.uk (U.K. office).

  Set in MT Baskerville type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937028

  ISBN 978-0-300-23830-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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  Sleep of Memory

  Once, on the quays, the title of a book caught my eye: The Time of Encounters. For me, too, there had been a time of encounters, in a long-distant past. I was prone back then to a fear of nothingness, like a kind of vertigo. I never felt it when alone, only with certain individuals whom I had in fact just encountered. I’d reassure myself that, when the time was right, I could steal away unnoticed. You never knew where some of those people might lead you. It was a slippery slope.

  I could start by talking about Sunday evenings. They filled me with dread, as they do anyone who has had to return to boarding school on late winter afternoons, at sunset. That dread pursues them in their dreams, sometimes for the rest of their lives. On Sunday evenings years later, a few people would gather in the apartment of Martine Hayward, and I happened to be among them. I was twenty and felt out of place. Guilt took hold of me again, as if I were still a boarder: as if, instead of going back to school, I had run away.

  Must I really start by talking about Martine Hayward and the various individuals surrounding her on those evenings? Or should I follow chronological order? I just don’t know.

  At around age fourteen, I got used to walking the streets on my own, on my days off from school, after the bus dropped us at Porte d’Orléans. My parents were out, my father absorbed in his deals, my mother acting in a play in Pigalle. That year, 1959, I discovered the Pigalle neighborhood, on Saturday evenings while my mother was onstage, and I often returned there in the decade that followed. I’ll provide some more details if I can work up the courage.

  At first I was afraid to walk alone, so for reassurance I’d always follow the same path: Rue Fontaine, Place Blanche, Place Pigalle, Rue Frochot, and Rue Victor-Massé up to the bakery on the corner of Rue Pigalle, a curious place that stayed open all night, where I’d buy myself a croissant.

  That same winter, on Saturdays when I wasn’t at school, I stood watch on Rue Spontini in front of the building where a girl lived whose name I’ve forgotten, and whom I’ll call “Stioppa’s daughter.” I didn’t actually know her. I had gotten her address from Stioppa himself, during one of those walks that he and my father used to take, with me, Sundays in the Bois de Boulogne. Stioppa was Russian, a friend of my father’s, and they saw each other frequently. Tall, with dark, oily hair. He used to wear an old overcoat with a fur collar. He’d had some financial setbacks. At around six in the evening, we’d walk him back to the boardinghouse where he lived. He told me he had a daughter my age and that I could call her. Apparently, he no longer saw her, as she lived with her mother and her mother’s new husband.

  On Saturday afternoons that winter, before going to join my mother in her dressing room at the theater in Pigalle, I would station myself in front of the building on Rue Spontini, waiting for the glass street door with its black ironwork to open and a girl my age, “Stioppa’s daughter,” to appear. I was certain she would be alone, would walk straight up to me, and it would be perfectly natural to talk with her. But she never came out of the building.

  Stioppa had given me her telephone number. Someone picked up. I said, “I’d like to speak with Stioppa’s daughter.” A pause. I introduced myself as “the son of a friend of Stioppa’s.” Her voice was clear and warm, as if we were old friends. “Call me next week,” she said. “We’ll make a date. It’s complicated . . . I don’t live at my father’s . . . I’ll explain everything . . .” But the next week, and all the other weeks that winter, the phone kept ringing without anyone answering. Two or three times, on Saturdays, before taking the metro to Pigalle, I again stood watch in front of the building on Rue Spontini. In vain. I could have rung at the door of their apartment but, as with the telephone, I felt certain no one would answer. And besides, after that spring, there were no more walks in the Bois de Boulogne with Stioppa. Or with my father.

  For a long time, I was convinced that the only true encounters were the ones that took place in the street. That’s why I waited for Stioppa’s daughter on the sidewalk, across from her building, though I had never met her. “I’ll explain everything,” she had said on the phone. For several days afterward, a voice spoke those words ever more faintly in my dreams. Yes, if I wanted to meet her, it was because I hoped she would give me some “explanations.” Perhaps they’d help me understand my father, a stranger who walked next to me in silence, down the paths of the Bois de Boulogne. She, Stioppa’s daughter, and I, Stioppa’s friend’s son, surely had things in common. And I was certain she knew more about all this than I did.

  In that same period, behind the half-open door of his office, my father would speak on the telephone. A phrase of his stuck with me: “the Russian black market crowd.” More than forty years later, I came across a list of Russian names, the names of prominent black marketeers in Paris during the German Occupation. Shapochnikov, Kurilo, Stamoglou, Baron Wolf, Mechersky, Djaparidze . . . Was Stioppa’s name among them? And my father’s, under an assumed Russian identity? I asked myself these questions once more before they became lost, answerless, in the depths of time.

  When I was about seventeen, I met a woman, Mireille Ourousov, who also had a Russian name. It was the name of her husband, Eddie Ourousov, aka “the Consul,” with whom she lived in Spain, near Torremolinos. She was French, from the Lande
s region. The dunes, the pine trees, the deserted beaches of the Atlantic, one sundrenched day in September . . . And yet I’d met her in Paris, in the winter of 1962. I had left my boarding school in the Haute-Savoie with a fever of 102, caught the train for Paris, and ended up at around midnight at my mother’s apartment. She was away and had given the keys to Mireille Ourousov, who was staying there for a few weeks before heading back to Spain. When I rang at the door, it was she who answered. The apartment looked abandoned. Not a stick of furniture, apart from a folding table and two garden chairs in the foyer, a large bed in the middle of the room that looked out on the river, and in the room next door, where I used to sleep when I was a child, a table, fabric samples, a tailor’s dummy, dresses and various garments on hangers. The chandelier gave off a dim light, as most of the bulbs had burned out.

  It was a strange February, what with the muted light in the apartment and assassination plots by the paramilitary OAS. Mireille Ourousov was on her way back from a skiing trip and showed me pictures of herself and her friends on the balcony of a chalet. On one of the photos, she was with an actor named Gérard Blain. She told me that Blain, a latchkey child, had started making movies at the age of twelve, without his parents’ consent. Later, when I saw him in a few films, it seemed to me he was always walking with his hands in his pockets, head slightly sunken into his shoulders, as if protecting himself from the rain. I spent most of my days with Mireille Ourousov. Usually we went out to eat. The gas in the apartment had been cut and we had to cook on an alcohol burner. No heat. But there were still a few logs left in the bedroom fireplace. One morning, we went to an office near Odéon to pay off a two-month-overdue electricity bill: for a while, we wouldn’t have to light our way by candle. Almost every night, at around midnight, she would take me to a cabaret on Rue des Saints-Pères, right near the apartment, long after the show was over. At the bar on the ground floor there were still a few patrons, who all seemed to know one another and spoke in low voices. We joined up with a friend of hers, one Jacques de Bavière (or Debavière), an athletic-looking blond; she said he was a “journalist” who “shuttled back and forth between Paris and Algiers.” I suppose that when she sometimes stayed out all night, it was to meet up with this Jacques de Bavière (or Debavière), who lived in a studio on Avenue Paul-Doumer. I went there with her one afternoon because she’d left her watch. Jacques de Bavière was out. He had taken us a few times to a restaurant off the Champs-Elysées, on Rue Washington, the Rose des Sables. Much later, I learned that the cabaret on Rue des Saints-Pères and the Rose des Sables were frequented at the time by members of a parapolice group involved in the Algerian War. And given the coincidence, I wondered whether Jacques de Bavière (or Debavière) might have been part of that organization. Another winter, in the seventies, at around six in the evening as I was going into the George-V metro stop, I saw coming out a man who might have been a slightly older Jacques de Bavière. I made an about-face and followed him, thinking I should go up to him to ask what had become of Mireille Ourousov. Was she still living in Torremolinos with her husband, Eddie, “the Consul”? He walked toward the Rond-Point des Champs-Elysées, limping slightly. I stopped when I reached the Café Marignan and gazed after him until he became lost in the crowd. Why hadn’t I approached him? Would he have recognized me? I can’t answer those questions. For me, Paris is littered with ghosts, as numerous as metro stations and all the dots that light up when you press the buttons on the electric route map.

  We often took the metro, Mireille Ourousov and I, at the Louvre station, to go to the neighborhoods in the west of Paris, where she visited friends whose faces I’ve forgotten. What remains clear in my memory is crossing the Seine with her over the Pont des Arts, then the square in front of the church of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, and sometimes the courtyard of the Louvre with, way in back, the yellow light of the police outpost, the same muted light as in the apartment. There were books on the shelves in my former room, near the large window on the right, and today I wonder by what miracle they had remained there, forgotten, when everything else had vanished. Books my mother read when she’d arrived in Paris in 1942—novels by Hans Fallada, books in Flemish—and also books for young readers that had belonged to me: The Mystery Freighter and The Vicomte of Bragelonne . . .

  Down in the Haute-Savoie, they had finally gotten concerned about my absence. One morning the telephone rang, and Mireille Ourousov answered. Father Janin, the school principal, wanted to know what had become of me, as they’d had no word for two weeks.

  She told him I was “not feeling well”—a bad cold—and that she’d let him know the exact date when I “planned to return.” I asked her point-blank: Could I go with her to Spain? As a minor, I would need written authorization from my parents to cross the border. And the fact that I hadn’t yet reached adulthood suddenly seemed of great concern to Mireille Ourousov, so much so that she resolved to ask Jacques de Bavière’s advice on the matter.

  My favorite time of day in Paris in winter was morning, between six o’clock and eight-thirty, when it was still dark out. A respite before daybreak. Time was suspended and you felt lighter than usual.

  I frequented various cafés at the hour when they opened their doors to the first customers. In the winter of 1964, in one of those dawn cafés—as I called them—when any hope seemed warranted as long as it was still dark, I would meet up with a certain Geneviève Dalame.

  The café was on the ground floor of one of those squat buildings, toward the end of Boulevard de la Gare in the 13th arrondissement. Today, the boulevard has been renamed and the squat houses and buildings, on the odd-numbered side before Place d’Italie, have been torn down. Sometimes I seem to recall the café was named the Bar Vert; at other times this memory fades, like words you’ve just heard in a dream that elude you when you wake.

  Geneviève Dalame was always the first to arrive, and when I entered the café I would see her sitting at the same table, way in back, head bowed over an open book. She’d told me she slept barely four hours a night. She worked as a secretary at Polydor Studios, a bit farther down the boulevard, which was why we would meet in that café before she went to work. I had gotten to know her in an occult bookstore on Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. She was very interested in the occult. I was too. Not that I wanted to submit to a doctrine or become some guru’s disciple, but because I liked mystery.

  When we left the bookstore, it was after sunset. And at that hour, in winter, I had the same feeling of lightness as very early in the morning, when it was still dark. From then on, the 5th arrondissement, with its many neighborhoods and its far reaches toward Boulevard de la Gare, would remain associated for me with Geneviève Dalame.

  At around eight-thirty, we would walk to her office along the median strip, where the elevated train ran overhead. I asked her about Polydor Studios. I had just passed an entrance exam to become a “lyricist” at the Composers’ and Music Publishers’ Guild, and I needed a “sponsor” in order to enroll. A certain Emil Stern, a songwriter, bandleader, and pianist, had agreed to sponsor me. He had conducted the orchestra for Edith Piaf’s first recordings, twenty-five years earlier, at Polydor Studios. I asked Geneviève Dalame if the studio archives still held any trace of that. One morning, at the café, she handed me an envelope containing the old log sheets for Edith Piaf’s recording sessions, conducted by my “sponsor,” Emil Stern. She seemed rather embarrassed at having stolen those files for me.

  At first, she hesitated to tell me where she lived, exactly. When I asked, she answered, “In a hotel.” We’d known each other for two weeks, and one evening, when I’d given her a copy of the Practical Dictionary of the Occult Sciences by Marianne Verneuil and a novel having to do with esotericism, In Memory of an Angel, she asked me to escort her back to that hotel.

  It was located at the bottom of Rue Monge, at the fringes of Les Gobelins and the 13th arrondissement. Nearly half a century has passed and people no longer live in hotel rooms in Paris, as was often the case after
the war and into the 1960s. Geneviève Dalame was the last person I knew who lived in a hotel. It also seems to me that in those years, 1963, 1964, the old world took one last breath before collapsing, like all those houses and apartment buildings on the outskirts that they were about to demolish. We were given the opportunity, we who were very young, to live for a few final months in those ancient surroundings. At the hotel on Rue Monge, I remember the pear-shaped light switch on the nightstand, and the black drapes that Geneviève Dalame always pulled shut with a sharp tug, drapes from the time of “passive defense,” which they hadn’t changed since the war.

  She introduced me to her brother a few weeks after we’d met, a brother she had never mentioned before. Once or twice I’d tried to find out more about her family, but I could tell she was reluctant to answer and I didn’t insist.

  One morning, I entered the café on Boulevard de la Gare and found her sitting at the usual table across from a dark-haired boy about our age. I sat on the bench, next to her. He was wearing a zipped jacket with padded shoulders, which seemed to be made of leopard skin. He smiled at me and ordered a grog in a ringing voice, as if he were a regular customer.

  Geneviève Dalame said, “This is my brother,” and from her discomfited expression I understood that he had shown up unexpectedly.

  He asked me “what I did in life,” and I answered evasively. Then, as if this bit of information could be useful to him, he asked a question that surprised me: “You live in Paris?” I thought to myself that he hadn’t always lived in Paris. Geneviève Dalame had told me she was born in the Vosges, though I don’t remember whether it was in Epinal or Saint-Dié. I could easily imagine her brother at a café table in one of those two cities at around 11 P.M., a café near the train station, the only one still open. He would no doubt be wearing the same ill-fitting jacket, in fake leopard skin; and that jacket, entirely unremarkable in a Paris street, would have attracted plenty of notice down there. He would be sitting alone, gaze unfocused, in front of a pint, while the last game of pool was being played.