Sleep of Memory

by Patrick Modiano

  Perhaps I had wanted until now to erase that Madame Hubersen from my memory, along with other people I met back then, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two.

  But after half a century, the few people who witnessed your early years have finally disappeared—and anyway, it’s doubtful that many of them would make the connection between what you’ve become and the vague image they’ve retained of a young man whose name they might not even recall.

  My memory of Madame Hubersen is also rather vague. A brunette of about thirty with regular features and bobbed hair. She used to take us to dinner near her building, in one of those streets perpendicular to Avenue Foch—on the left side of the avenue, facing away from the Arc de Triomphe. And here I am, no longer afraid to provide topographical details. I tell myself that this is all so far in the past that it’s covered by what the law calls amnesty. We would go on foot from her house to the restaurant that winter, a winter that was as harsh as the ones before it, next to which the winters of today seem rather mild; a winter like the ones I knew in the Haute-Savoie, when at night the air you breathed was frigid and clear and as intoxicating as ether. Madame Hubersen wore a fur coat of fairly classic cut. She had no doubt led a more bourgeois life than the one she was leading now, judging from the mess her apartment was in. It was on the top floor of a modern building, two or three rooms cluttered with paintings, African and Oceanic masks, Indian textiles.

  About that Madame Hubersen, I know little apart from what Madeleine Péraud had told us, the first evening we went to visit her. She lived alone and was divorced from an American. She apparently knew a lot of people in ballet circles. One evening she had taken us a long distance, all the way to the Bassin de la Villette, to the home of a man who according to her threw a party, on the same date every year, in honor of the dancers. There, in a minuscule apartment, I had been amazed to see the ballet stars I so admired at the time, among them a young ballerina from the Opéra who later became a Carmelite nun. She is still alive today and is no doubt the only person who could tell me exactly who that mysterious dance lover was.

  In my notebooks, I came across something I’d jotted down more than ten years ago, dated May 1, 2006: “The man with the Turkish name who, in the sixties, used to throw a party at his home for ballet dancers (Nureyev, Béjart, Babilée, Yvette Chauviré, etc.). He lived on one of the quays of the Bassin de la Villette or the Ourcq canal.” And to make certain this memory was indeed real, I had checked the phone book for the man’s name and address, since it’s written down in blue ballpoint:

  11 Quai de la Gironde (19th arrondissement)

  Amram, R., COMbat 7314

  Mouyal, Matathias, COMbat 8206 (1964 directory)

  That address and those two names are preceded by question marks, in the same blue ink.

  I would see Madame Hubersen one last time, in the month of August 1967.

  But before describing that encounter, I’d like to clarify something: I have occasionally run into the same people several times in the streets of Paris, people I didn’t know. By dint of crossing paths with them, I grew to recognize their faces. I assumed they paid no attention to me and that only I had noticed these chance encounters; otherwise, we would have greeted each other or started a conversation. Most disturbing was when I kept running into the same person in different neighborhoods, in very separate parts of town, as if fate—or chance—insisted on us getting to know each other. And every time, I felt remorse at letting that person go by without saying anything. Many paths led away from that crossing, and I had neglected one, perhaps the best of all. As a consolation, I scrupulously recorded each of those fruitless encounters in my notebook, specifying the exact spot and physical appearance of the anonymous party. Paris is studded with nerve centers and the many forms our lives might have taken.

  Madame Hubersen, then: I ran into her one last time that month of August, when I was living in a tiny room in a clutch of buildings surrounding a small courtyard that opened onto Boulevard Gouvion-Saint-Cyr. It was very hot that summer and the neighborhood was deserted. You didn’t even feel up to taking the metro in search of a little activity nearer the center. You let yourself be overcome by lassitude. The only open restaurant on Boulevard Gouvion-Saint-Cyr was called La Passée. I was afraid I wouldn’t be very welcome in that establishment. I imagined a few shady customers sitting around a game of poker, but that night I decided to cross the threshold.

  The décor in La Passée was like that of a country inn. A bar at the entrance and two rooms one after the other, the second looking out on a small garden. All at once, the sense of strangeness I felt in Paris in August got so bad that I wanted to double back and return as fast as possible to the sidewalk of Boulevard Gouvion-Saint-Cyr and the noise of the few automobiles heading toward Porte Maillot. But a woman led me to the second room and pointed me toward a table next to the garden.

  I sat down with the feeling of being stuck in a dream, no doubt because I hadn’t spoken to a soul in days. Never had the expression “cut off from the world” seemed so appropriate. No other customers, save for a woman on her own, seated at the back of the room. She was wearing a fur coat, which surprised me in the middle of August. She didn’t seem to have noticed my presence. I recognized Madame Hubersen. She hadn’t changed, and her fur coat was the same one she had worn three years earlier.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I walked over to her.

  “Madame Hubersen?”

  She raised her eyes to me, and didn’t seem to recognize me.

  “We met a few times three years ago . . . with Madeleine Péraud . . .”

  She was still gaping at me, and I wondered whether she had heard.

  “Oh yes . . . Of course . . .” she suddenly said, as if she’d suffered a momentary lapse. “With Madeleine Péraud . . . And have you had any news of Madeleine Péraud?”

  I could see she was trying to bounce back. I had simply roused her too abruptly from a deep sleep.

  “No, no news.”

  She gave me a sheepish smile. She was searching for her words.

  “Do you remember?” I said to her. “You brought us to a party . . . with all those dancers . . .”

  “Right . . . right . . . of course . . . I don’t know if they still throw that party every year . . .”

  It was as if she were alluding to some long-distant event, which was barely three years old but which for her belonged to another life. And I have to say that I had the same impression when I recalled all those guests sitting on the floor in the two rooms of that small apartment, and the full moon that winter night, above the Bassin de la Villette or the Ourcq canal.

  “Are you still living at the same address?”

  Maybe I had asked her that question to get a precise answer and not feel like I was dealing with a ghost.

  “Still at the same address . . .”

  She gave out a small laugh, for which I was grateful. She no longer seemed like a ghost.

  “You ask such odd questions . . . And what about you—still at the same address?”

  She seemed to be gently mocking me.

  “Have a seat. Would you like to order something? I’ve already eaten . . .”

  I sat down facing her. I intended to take my leave after a few moments, on the pretext of making a phone call. But once seated, I felt it would be difficult to stand up and cross the room to the exit. I was overcome by torpor.

  “Don’t mind the fur coat,” she said. “I put it on tonight because I thought the temperature was about to drop. Apparently not.”

  But I didn’t need any explanations. You have to take people as they are, with or without fur coats. If need be, ask a few discreet questions, gently, without arousing their suspicion, the better to understand them. And after all, I had met Madame Hubersen only three or four times and I never would have expected to run into her three years later. Encounters so brief they could easily have fallen into oblivion.

  “So how do you know about this place?” I asked. “La Passée?” />
  “A friend of mine brought me here a few times. But he’s away on holiday . . .”

  She spoke in a clear, firm voice, and what she had just said made perfect sense. One often finds oneself alone in Paris in the month of August and in dubious places, in the image of that season when time seems to have stopped—places that disappear once life has regained its rhythm, and the city its normal appearance.

  “You don’t want anything to eat? How about something to drink?”

  She picked up a carafe from the table and filled a large glass with what I thought was water, but whose taste surprised me when I’d taken a gulp: very strong alcohol. Then she poured some for herself. She swallowed not a gulp but half the glass, in one go, with a slight movement of her head.

  “Aren’t you drinking?” She seemed disappointed and a little embarrassed, as if I had cast her back into her solitude. So I emptied my glass as well.

  “You see,” she said, “we need to warm up despite the heat.”

  I felt she wanted to say something else, but was hesitating and couldn’t find the words.

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret.”

  She laid her hand flat on mine to pluck up her courage.

  “No matter how hot it gets, if you only knew how cold I am all the time . . .”

  She gave me a look that was at once shy and questioning, waiting for an answer, or rather a reassuring diagnosis.

  We left La Passée. She leaned on my arm along Boulevard Gouvion-Saint-Cyr. A breeze blew, the first in two weeks.

  “Looks like you were right to wear your fur coat,” I said.

  She might have wanted to walk home. But in that case, we were heading in the wrong direction. I pointed this out to her.

  “I feel like walking a bit, just to the first taxi stand.”

  At that late hour and in that season, there was no traffic on Boulevard Gouvion-Saint-Cyr. It’s strange, but in writing this today, I can hear the echo of our footsteps—or rather, of hers—on the empty sidewalk. We had arrived at the small courtyard where I lived. For a moment, I was tempted to take my leave, say that someone was waiting for me up in my room—a garret so small that at the door I had to fall onto the bed so as not to bump my head on the beam. And at the thought, I couldn’t help laughing. She leaned more tightly against my arm.

  “What’s so funny?”

  I didn’t know what to answer. Was she really expecting one? With her free hand, she had raised the collar of her fur coat, as if the breeze had suddenly turned chilly.

  “Do you still have those African and Oceanic masks in your apartment?” I asked her to break the silence.

  She stopped and stared at me in surprise.

  “You’ve got some memory!”

  Yes, I do . . . But I also remember details of my life, people I’ve tried very hard to forget. I thought I had succeeded, and then out of the blue, after dozens of years, they rise to the surface like a drowned man, at a bend in the street, at certain hours of the day.

  We were at Porte de Champerret. A lone taxi was waiting at the stand, in front of the group of buildings with brick façades.

  “Will you come with me?” Madame Hubersen asked.

  Once again, I almost told her someone was waiting in my room. But I suddenly felt bad about lying to her. So many lies already to run out on people, so many buildings with rear exits for quick escapes, so many appointments I didn’t keep . . .

  I climbed into the taxi with her. I thought the ride would be short, to her place, and that I could walk back.

  “We’re going to Versailles, Boulevard de la Reine,” she told the driver.

  I remained silent. I waited for an explanation.

  “I’m afraid to go home. All those masks you asked about before . . . They watch me, and mean me no good . . .”

  She had said it in such a serious tone that I was left speechless. And then I found my voice again.

  “I think you must be wrong. Those masks can’t be as malevolent as all that . . .”

  But I realized she wasn’t joking. The taxi had turned onto Boulevard Gouvion-Saint-Cyr, in the direction opposite the one we’d been following earlier. We had nearly reached the little courtyard where my building was.

  “I have to go home now,” I said. “It’s just up here, on the right . . .”

  “Be nice and come with me to Versailles.”

  Her request was not to be denied, as if it were a moral imperative. The taxi had stopped at a red light in front of the large fire station. I was tempted to push open the door, mumble a polite excuse, and take my leave. But I told myself I had plenty of time for that on the way to Versailles. I thought about that book I’d read, Dreams and How to Direct Them, which says that you can interrupt dreams at any moment, and even make them change course. All I had to do was concentrate a little for the taxi driver to let us off in front of Madame Hubersen’s building, and to forget we were going to Versailles. Madame Hubersen too.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go home?” I asked her quietly.

  She moved her face close to mine and said, also quietly:

  “You have no idea what it’s like to come home to that apartment every evening . . . and be there alone with those masks . . . And besides, for a while now I’ve been afraid to take the elevator . . .”

  I was still too young to know the anxiety she felt when returning home alone. Personally, I had no problem taking the elevator, then climbing the small stairway and following the hallway that led to that garret where I couldn’t even stand upright. And now that I’m nearly forty years older than Madame Hubersen was at the time, I tell myself it was strange at her age to let herself be prey to such anxiety. But perhaps we shouldn’t put too much stock in certain notions, like “the insouciance of youth.”

  We stopped at another red light, near the restaurant La Passée. There were other stoplights along the way—I told myself—that would allow me to escape. It wouldn’t be the first time: twice before, I had bolted from a car that was bringing me back to boarding school on Sunday evening; and again, at around twenty, when I found myself in the company of several individuals in a Chevrolet whose driver was drunk. As luck would have it, I had been sitting by the door.

  “You really don’t want to go back home?” I asked Madame Hubersen again.

  “Not right now. Tomorrow, when it’s light out.”

  We had arrived at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, and Madame Hubersen had closed her eyes. I checked that the door wasn’t locked from inside, as was sometimes the case in taxis at night. No. I still had a little time to make up my mind.

  At Porte d’Auteuil, Madame Hubersen’s head rolled onto my shoulder. She had fallen asleep. If I left the car now, I would have to do it gently, by sliding quietly over the seat and not slamming the door. Her head, so light on my shoulder, was like a mark of trust on her part, and I had qualms about betraying that trust. Porte de Saint-Cloud. We were about to cross the Seine, enter the tunnel, then take the western highway. And there would be no more red lights.

  From the age of eleven, escapes played a large part in my life. Escapes from boarding schools; escapes from Paris on a night train when I was supposed to show up at the Reuilly barracks for my military service; appointments that I disappointed; or stock phrases to get away: “Wait here, I just have to go buy cigarettes,” and that promise I must have made dozens and dozens of times, not keeping it once: “I’ll be right back.”

  Today, I feel some regret about it. Although I’m not very good at introspection, I would like to understand why flight was my modus operandi. And it lasted a fairly long time, I’d say until the age of twenty-two. Was it like those childhood illnesses that have such peculiar names: whooping cough, chicken pox, scarlet fever? Beyond my personal case, I’ve always dreamed of writing a treatise on escape, in the manner of those French moralists and memorialists whose style I’ve so admired since I was an adolescent: Cardinal de Retz, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Vauvenargues . . . But I can only relate concrete det
ails, precise places and moments. In particular, that afternoon in the summer of ’65 when I found myself at the bar of a narrow café at the beginning of Boulevard Saint-Michel, which stood out from the other cafés in the neighborhood in that it didn’t cater to students. A long counter, like the ones in Pigalle or around Saint-Lazare train station. I realized, that afternoon, that I had been letting myself drift and that, if I didn’t do something about it immediately, I’d be swept away. I had always thought I was in no danger, that I enjoyed a kind of immunity in my capacity as a nocturnal spectator—as one eighteenth-century writer who explored the mysteries of nighttime Paris had styled himself. But in this case, my curiosity had led me a bit too far. I felt what they call the “wind of the cannonball.” I had to disappear right away if I wanted to stay out of trouble. This would be a much bigger escape than the others. I had hit bottom, and my only recourse was to push off hard with my heel to rise back to the surface.

  The evening before, an event had occurred that I alluded to twenty years later, in 1985, in a chapter of a novel. It was a way of ridding myself of a weight, of setting down in black and white a kind of partial confession. But twenty years was too short a time for certain witnesses to disappear, and I wondered what the statute of limitations was before the law would give up pursuing the perpetrators or their accomplices and drape them once and for all in a veil of amnesty and oblivion.