Patrick Modiano - Suspended Sentences

I sipped the ice-cold milk. Yes, little by little, the world around me regained its shapes and colors, as if I were adjusting a pair of binoculars to bring them into focus. Jansen, in front of me, looked at me kindly.

“Don’t let it faze you, kid. I’ve fallen into my share of black holes too …”

A breeze was ruffling the leaves on the trees, and their shade felt cool as Jansen and I walked along the main boulevards. We had come to Place de la Concorde. We went into the gardens of the Champs-Elysées. Jansen took pictures with his Rolleiflex, but I scarcely noticed. He cast a furtive eye on the viewfinder, level with his waist. And yet I knew that each of his photos was perfectly framed. One day, when I’d expressed surprise at that feigned carelessness, he’d told me you had to “approach things gently and quietly or they pull away.”

We had sat on a bench and, still talking, he stood up now and then and pressed the shutter as a dog passed by, or a child, or a ray of sunlight appeared. He had stretched out and crossed his legs and his head was lolling as if he’d dozed off.

I asked what he was shooting.

“My shoes.”

Via Avenue Matignon, we entered Faubourg Saint-Honoré. He pointed out the building that housed the Magnum agency and suggested we have a drink in the café next door where he used to go with Robert Capa, back in the day.

We sat at a rear table, and again he ordered a glass of milk for me and a whiskey for himself.

“This is where I met Colette,” he said suddenly.

I wanted to ask questions, talk about the few photos of her I’d indexed in the red notebook:

Colette, 12 Hameau du Danube

Colette with an umbrella

Colette, beach at Pampelonne

Colette, steps on Rue des Cascades

I finally said, “It’s too bad I didn’t know all of you at the time …”

He smiled at me.

“But you were still in diapers …”

And he pointed to my glass of milk, which I was holding in my hand.

“Wait a second … Don’t move …”

He set the Rolleiflex on the table and pressed the shutter. I have that photo here next to me, with all the other ones he took that afternoon. My raised arm, my fingers clutching the glass, are sharply defined against the glare; in the background you can make out the open door of the café, the sidewalk, and the street bathed in summer light — the same light in which we walked, my mother and I, in my memory, alongside Colette Laurent.

After dinner, I walked him back to the studio. We made a long detour. He was more talkative than usual and for the first time he asked specific questions about my future. He was worried about what my living conditions would be. He mentioned the precariousness of his life in Paris when he was my age. Meeting Robert Capa had saved him; without that, he might not have had the courage to strike out in his field. Moreover, it was Capa who had taught it to him.

It was already past midnight and we were still chatting on a bench on Avenue du Maine. A pointer trotted alone down the sidewalk, rapidly, and came up to sniff us. It had no collar. It seemed to know Jansen. It followed us to Rue de Froidevaux, first at a distance, then it came up and walked alongside us. We arrived at the studio and Jansen felt in his pockets but he couldn’t find his key. He suddenly looked exhausted. I think he’d had too much to drink. I opened the door with the spare he’d given me.

In the doorway, he shook my hand and said in a solemn tone:

“Thank you for everything.”

He stared at me with a slightly clouded gaze. He closed the door before I had a chance to say that the dog had slipped into the studio behind him.

The next morning, I phoned at around eleven but there was no answer. I had used our prearranged signal: three rings, hang up, ring again. I decided to go over there to finish putting away the photos.

As usual, I opened the door with my spare key. The three suitcases had disappeared, along with the picture of Colette Laurent and the one of Jansen with Robert Capa that had been hanging on the wall. On the coffee table, a roll of film to be developed. I took it that afternoon to the shop on Rue Delambre. When I went back to get it a few days later, I discovered in the envelope all the photos Jansen had taken during our walk through Paris.

I knew that there was no longer any point in waiting for him.

I searched through the closets upstairs, but there was nothing in them, not a single article of clothing, not even a sock. Someone had removed the sheets and bedclothes, and the mattress was bare. Not one cigarette butt in the ashtrays. No more glasses or bottles of whiskey. I felt like a police inspector looking through the apartment of a man who’d been wanted for a long time, and I told myself it was useless, since there was no proof the man had ever lived here, not even a fingerprint.

I waited until five o’clock, sitting on the sofa, looking through the red notebook and the index. Apparently, Jansen had taken the second copies of the notebooks. Perhaps Nicole would ring at the door and I’d have to tell her that from now on we’d probably be waiting for Jansen in vain and that centuries from now, an archeologist would find the two of us mummified on the sofa. Rue Froidevaux would become an excavation site. At the corner of the Montparnasse cemetery, they’d find Gil the Mime turned into a statue, and they’d hear his heart beating. And the tape recorder, behind him, would still be playing a poem that he’d recorded in his metallic voice:

Demons and marvels

Winds and tides …

A question suddenly occurred to me: what had become of the pointer that had followed us the night before, the one that had slipped into the studio without Jansen realizing it? Had he taken it with him? Now that I think about it, I wonder whether the dog wasn’t simply his.

I went back to the studio later, when evening was falling. A final spot of sunlight lingered on the sofa. Between those walls, the heat was stifling. I opened the bay window. I could hear the rustling of the trees and the footfalls of people walking in the street. I was amazed that the roar of traffic had stopped farther over toward Denfert-Rochereau, as if the feeling of absence and emptiness that Jansen left was spreading in concentric circles and Paris was gradually clearing out.

I wondered why he hadn’t told me he was leaving. But those few signs were indicative of an imminent departure: the photo he’d taken of the hotel on Boulevard Raspail and the detour up to Faubourg Saint-Honoré to show me Magnum’s old headquarters and the café he used to frequent with Robert Capa and Colette Laurent. Yes, he had made, in my company, a final pilgrimage to the places of his youth. At the back of the studio, the darkroom door was ajar. The afternoon when Jansen had developed the pictures of my girlfriend and me, the small light bulb had shone red in the dark. He stood in front of the developing tray with rubber gloves on. He had handed me the negatives. When we went back into the studio, the light of the sun had blinded me.

I didn’t hold it against him. I even understood him so well … I had noticed in him certain ways of acting and certain character traits that had become familiar. He’d said to me, “Don’t let it faze you, kid. I’ve fallen into my share of black holes too …” I couldn’t predict the future, but thirty years later, when I’d become the same age as Jansen, I wouldn’t answer the telephone either, and I would disappear, as he had, one June evening, in the company of a phantom dog.

Three years later, on a June evening that strangely enough was the anniversary of his departure, Jansen was very much on my mind. Not because of that anniversary, but because a publisher had just accepted my first book, and in the inner pocket of my jacket I had a letter announcing the news.