She reappeared just when I was sure she had vanished and was about to go upstairs to see for myself. She was carrying a black leather suitcase. She sat down next to me on the couch. And all of a sudden, I felt the same thought cross our minds: the body of Ludo F. in the apartment on Avenue Rodin.
* * *
I had taken her suitcase, which was rather heavy, and again we followed Avenue du Nord. She was relieved to have left the house behind. So was I. There are certain places that don’t arouse your suspicions at first because they look so normal, but after a few moments they give off a bad aura. And I had always been sensitive to what they call “the spirit of the place.” So much so that I left very quickly if I felt the slightest doubt, like that winter afternoon in the café La Source when I was with Geneviève Dalame’s brother and his friend with the face of a former stable boy. Moreover, I tried to probe the matter by listing in my notebooks the exact places and addresses where I’d decided not to linger. It’s a special gift, a sixth sense that you find, for instance, in truffle hounds, and that is also reminiscent of certain devices, like mine detectors. Over the following years, I saw that I hadn’t been mistaken about most of those places and addresses. I learned why they gave off a bad aura, often twenty or thirty years after the fact, from random comments, coincidences, old newspaper clippings. Sometimes all it took was a few words of conversation overheard in a café.
Now and again I paused on Avenue du Nord to set her suitcase down on the sidewalk. It was one heavy piece of luggage. I finally asked if she’d stuffed Ludo F.’s body in there. She remained expressionless, but didn’t appear to appreciate the joke. Was it a joke? Sometimes, in my dreams, and even at the very moment I’m writing this, I can feel in my right hand the weight of that suitcase, like a healed wound that still aches in winter or on rainy days. An old regret? It pursued me, without my being able to identify its cause. One time, I had an intuition that the cause dated from before my birth, and that this regret had spread along a safety fuse. My intuition was so fleeting, a match whose tiny flame flares for a few seconds in the dark before going out . . .
It was still a long road to La Varenne station, where I had arrived from Paris on the day of our first date. I proposed we spend that evening and night at the Petit Ritz, as we had done two weeks earlier. But she reminded me that I had signed the register of the Petit Ritz with my real name, as I had done recently at the Hôtel Malakoff. And besides, the regulars at the Petit Ritz knew her by sight. Better to lie low.
I wonder if it was the dim and distant memory of a summer afternoon spent in Saint-Maur that caused me to write these few lines in a notebook forty-six years later, on December 26, 2011:
“Dream. I’m with a police superintendent who hands me a summons on yellowed paper. The first sentence mentions a crime about which I have to testify. I don’t want to read these pages. I misplace them. Later, I learn that it concerns a girl from Saint-Maur-des-Fossés who killed a man older than she in Marly-le-Roi (?). I don’t know what I’ve been witness to.
“This corresponds to a recurring dream: they have already arrested certain individuals but haven’t identified me. And I live under threat of being arrested in turn once they realize I have connections with the ‘guilty parties.’ But guilty of what?”
Last year, at the bottom of a large envelope, among expired navy blue passports and report cards from a children’s home and a boarding school in the Haute-Savoie, I came upon some typed sheets.
At first, I hesitated to reread those few pages of onionskin held together by a rusty paperclip. I wanted to get rid of them right away, but that struck me as impossible, like radioactive waste that it’s no use burying hundreds of feet underground.
The only way to defuse this thin file once and for all was to copy out portions of it and blend them into the pages of a novel, as I did thirty years ago. That way, no one would know whether they belonged to reality or the realm of dreams. Today, March 10, 2017, I again opened the pale green sleeve, removed the paperclip that left rust stains on the first sheet and, before ripping the whole thing to shreds and leaving not a single material trace, I’ll copy over a few sentences and then be done with it.
On the first sheet, June 29, 1965
Criminal Investigations Division. Vice Squad.
Location of the slugs.
Three slugs were found, corresponding to the three spent shells . . .
Regarding the various hypotheses about what led to the murder of Ludovic F. . . .
On the second sheet, July 5, 1965
Criminal Investigations Division. Vice Squad.
The alleged Ludovic F. had used this alias for about twenty years. He is actually a certain Aksel B., aka Bowels. Born Feb. 20, 1916, in Frederiksberg, Denmark. No known profession. At large since April 1949, having resided in Paris (16th arr.). Last known domicile: 48 Rue des Belles-Feuilles.
On the fourth sheet, July 5, 1965
Note
Criminal Investigations Division
Vice Squad.
Jean D.
Born July 25, 1945, in Boulogne-Billancourt (Seine) . . . Two hotel registration cards have been found in the name of Jean D., who filled them out in June:
June 7, 1965: Hotel-restaurant Petit Ritz, 68 Avenue du 11-Novembre in La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire (Seine-et-Marne).
June 28, 1965: Hôtel Malakoff, 3 Avenue Raymond-Poincaré, Paris 16, on which he indicated his home address as 2 Avenue Rodin (16th).
At both the Petit Ritz and the Malakoff, he was accompanied by a young woman of about twenty, average height, brown hair, blue eyes, whose description matches the deposition of Mr. R., concierge, 2 Avenue Rodin, Paris 16.
So far, this young woman has not been identified.
Although she was never identified, I tracked her down twenty years later. Her name was in the Paris phone book for that year, a first and last name that could only be hers. 76 Boulevard Sérurier, 19th arrondissement. 208-7668.
It was in the month of August. The telephone didn’t answer. Several times, in late afternoon, I stood watch in front of the brick building behind which stretches the park called Butte-du-Chapeau-Rouge. I didn’t know this neighborhood. It’s other people who reveal to you a city’s most secret and distant areas, by making appointments at such-and-such an address. When they disappear, they drag you in their wake. In late afternoon, at the bottom of Boulevard Sérurier, it felt as though time had stopped. The sunlight and silence, the blue of the sky, the ochre color of the building, the green trees in the park . . . all of this formed a contrast, in my memory, with the Bassin de la Villette or the Ourcq canal, a bit farther north in the same arrondissement, which I had discovered one December night thanks to Madame Hubersen.
Nothing had changed for me. That summer, I waited at the doorway of a building, as I had waited on the sidewalk, twenty-five years earlier, in winter, for Stioppa’s daughter. If anyone had asked me what was the point of all this, I think I would have answered simply, “I’m trying to solve the mysteries of Paris.”
One afternoon that late August, I recognized her silhouette from afar, at the top of Boulevard Sérurier. I wasn’t surprised. All you need is a little patience. I remembered my bedside reading back when we’d known each other: Eternity by the Stars and The Eternal Return of the Same . . . She was walking down the slope, a suitcase in her hand, but not the black leather one I’d carried to La Varenne station. A tin suitcase. It reflected the sunlight. I joined her halfway down Boulevard Sérurier.
I took her suitcase. We didn’t need to speak. We had left on foot from Saint-Maur, 35 Avenue du Nord, and it had taken us twenty years to reach 76 Boulevard Sérurier. This suitcase seemed much lighter than the other one. So light that I wondered whether it was empty. No doubt, as the years pass, you end up shedding all the weights you dragged behind you, and all the regrets.
I noticed a scar across her forehead. A car accident, she said. One of those accidents that make you lose your memory. And yet she had recognized me. But she didn’t seem to
remember the events of summer 1965.
She was just back from the South and asked me to walk her home. We could have strolled in the middle of the boulevard that afternoon, for it was deserted, like the streets of Montmartre in the past, at the same hour and in the same season. And for me, those two summers blend together.
Between the pages of a novel, I came across a leaf from a datebook bearing the date Wednesday, April 20, and the mention “Saint Odette,” but without giving the year. The novel is called Tempo di Roma, and it seems to me I read it toward the end of the sixties. At the time, I must have used the leaf as a bookmark. Or else I had bought the novel secondhand on the quays and the leaf was already in it. Written on the leaf were some directions in ink, in the color called “aqua blue”:
Southern Highway or Route 7
Or Gare de Lyon
Nemours. Moret
Exit at Nemours
Leave Nemours to the right
Sens road for 10 km
Turn right
Remauville
Last house in the village, to the right facing the church
Green door
525-6631
432-5601
The two phone numbers no longer worked. Each time I dialed them, I heard very distant voices calling to each other, or pursuing a conversation of which you couldn’t make out a single word. I believe those voices belonged to the mysterious “network” of people who used to take advantage of the vacancy left by disconnected phone lines to communicate with each other.
The irregular handwriting in blue ink might have been mine, but if so, I must have jotted down those directions in haste, from the rushed instructions of someone who barely had time to give them, or who said them in a low voice so as not to attract attention.
I’d been wanting to get to the bottom of this for several months, but I kept putting off my plan of going to the premises. And besides, those premises must have changed, or disappeared, or become inaccessible if you didn’t have an old Geological Survey map.
Today I’ve made up my mind, I’m going to follow those directions right to the end. Over these past months, I wondered whether I hadn’t already done so in the past, for the name “Nemours” rang a bell. Perhaps I hadn’t continued past Nemours. Or else a double of myself had gone to the last house in the village and the green door. A double or doppelganger of those mentioned in Eternity by the Stars, one of my bedside books. Thousands and thousands of doubles of yourself follow the thousands of paths that you didn’t take at various crossroads in your life, because you thought there was but a single one.
Among the old Geological Survey maps I’d bought nearly fifty years ago, I found the one for Nemours and environs. It indicates roads, paths, and villages that no longer appear on the current Michelin map for that region. I would have to follow the earlier map if I wanted to reach my destination.
I preferred to leave at around five in the afternoon. It was the beginning of September and the sun was still setting late. So as not to risk getting lost, I supplemented the itinerary on the datebook page, consulting the old Geological Survey map. I planned a few detours, the better to learn the terrain and thus explore some alternate routes.
Nemours. Moret
Go through Veneux-les-Sablons (Rte. 6)
After Moret, take the Orvanne valley
Cross through Lorrez-le-Boccage (Rte. D-218)
Villecerf (D-218)
Dormelles
Then head back toward Nemours
Leave Nemours to the right
Go through Laversanne
Sens road for 10 km
Cut through Bazoches-sur-le-Betz and the Baslins farm
Return via Egreville and Chaintreaux
Remauville
Last house in the village, to the right, facing the church
Vieux Lavoir slope to the green door
Alley. Sleeping Beauty castle
My handwriting was much steadier than the blue ink on the datebook leaf. The more precise I made the directions, the more it was as if I had already followed them, and I no longer needed to consult the old Geological Survey map. But was it really the right way? In our memories blend images of roads that we have taken, and we can’t recall what regions they cross.
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, Sundays in August, and Such Fine Boys (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 fifty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite Duras, Jean Echenoz, Raymond Roussel, and seven other volumes by Patrick Modiano. 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 eleven books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, which was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction; Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados; Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited; and Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto. He directs the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Sleep of Memory Page 6
