Patrick Modiano - Suspended Sentences

“A whiskey for Old Top here …”

The waiter, behind the bar, smiled and said:

“We don’t serve alcohol to minors, Mademoiselle.”

She let me take a sip from her glass. The whiskey had a particularly acrid taste, but it gave me the courage to confess that I couldn’t go home, as my parents were both away until the following month.

“So you just have to go back to your school,” said the one wearing dark glasses and smoking yellow cigarettes.

I explained that that was impossible: if a student ran away, the punishment was always immediate expulsion. They’d refuse to keep me.

“And there’s nobody home at all?”

“Nobody.”

“And can’t we get hold of your parents?”

“No.”

“Don’t you have the key to your house?”

“No.”

“I’ll take care of Old Top,” said the Danish girl.

She rested her hand on my shoulder. We took our leave of the others and walked out of Chez Malafosse. Her car was parked a little farther on, along the river, past the Ecole des Beaux-Arts: a navy blue Peugeot 203 with red leather seats. I knew that car. I’d seen it in the neighborhood several times, in front of the Louisiane and Montana hotels.

I was sitting next to her on the front seat. She peeled away from the curb.

“Someone is going to have to look after you,” she said in a calm voice.

We followed the quays and crossed the Seine via the Pont de la Concorde. On the Right Bank, I felt better, as if the Seine were a border that protected me from a savage hinterland. We were far from the Café de la Rotonde, La Croix de Berny, and the school … But I couldn’t help thinking of the future with anxiety, as I felt I’d done something irreparable.

“Do you think it’s serious?” I asked her.

“What’s serious?”

She turned to me.

“No, of course not, old top … It’ll work out …”

Her Danish accent reassured me. We drove alongside the Cours la Reine, and I told myself I could at least rely on her.

“They’ll tell the police.”

“Are you afraid of the police?”

She smiled and her periwinkle eyes rested on me.

“Don’t you worry, old top …”

The soft, husky rustle of her voice dissipated my anxiety. We had arrived at Place de l’Alma and were driving along the avenue that leads to Trocadéro. It was the route the 63 bus followed when we took it, my brother and I, to go to the Bois de Boulogne. When it was nice out, we stood on the platform.

She did not turn right, onto the tree-shaded avenue that the number 63 took. She parked the car in front of the large modern buildings at the end of Avenue Paul-Doumer.

“This is where I live.”

On the ground floor, we took a long hallway lit by neons. A silhouette in a raincoat was waiting at her door. A tall, dark man with a fine mustache. A cigarette was hanging from the corner of his mouth. He, too, was someone I’d seen around the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

“I didn’t have the key,” he said.

He smiled at me, looking mildly surprised.

“He’s a pal of mine,” she said, pointing to me.

“Nice to meet you.”

He shook my hand. She said to me:

“Go take a walk, old top … Come back in an hour … This evening, I’ll take you to a restaurant and afterward we’ll go to the movies …”

She opened her door and the two of them went in. Then she poked her head through the doorway.

“Don’t forget the number of the room when you come back. It’s 23 …”

With her finger she showed me the figure 23, in gilded metal on the pale wood.

“Come back in an hour … This evening, we’ll go have a good tuck-in in Montmartre, at the San Cristobal …”

Her Danish accent was even softer, more caressing because of the outdated slang expression.

She shut the door. For a moment, I stood frozen in the hall. It took a huge effort not to knock. I left the building and walked with slow, regular steps, for I could feel the panic rising in me. I thought I’d never manage to cross the traffic circle at Trocadéro. I talked myself out of entering the first police station I saw and confessing my crime. But no, it was absurd. They’d put me in a real reform school, or what they called a “supervised environment.” Could I really trust the Danish girl? I should have stayed on the sidewalk of Avenue Paul-Doumer, to make sure she didn’t leave. The dark-haired man in the raincoat who’d gone into her place might persuade her not to look after me. Room 23. I mustn’t forget the number. Still three-quarters of an hour to go. And if she wasn’t there, I’d wait for her at the door of her building, keeping out of sight until she returned.

I tried to reassure myself by tossing all those ideas around in my head. On the other side of the traffic circle was the stop for the 63 bus. Did I have enough time to ride as far as the Bois de Boulogne and back again? I still had ten francs. But I was scared at the thought of finding myself all alone on that bus, and all alone on the lawn at La Muette and next to the lake, those places where I’d used to go, only a few years before, with my brother. Instead I went onto the esplanade that overlooks Paris. Then I walked down the sloping alleys of the garden that were bathed in winter light. No one was around. I felt better. Above me were the huge windows and cornice of the Palais de Chaillot. It felt as if the auditoriums and galleries inside were as empty as the gardens. I went to sit on a bench. Almost at once, my immobility brought that panic back to the surface. So I stood up again and continued down the alleys, toward the Seine.

I ended up in front of the Aquarium. I bought a ticket. It was like going into a subway station. It was dark at the bottom of the steps, but that comforted me. In the room where I then found myself, only the tanks were lit. Little by little, in the bosom of those shadows, I regained my peace of mind. Nothing mattered. I was far removed from everything: my parents, my school, the commotion of life, in which the only good memory was that soft, murmuring voice with its Danish accent … I approached the tanks. The fish were as brightly colored as the bumper cars of my childhood: pink, turquoise, emerald … They made no noise. They slid along the glass partitions. They opened their mouths without emitting a sound, but now and again bubbles would rise to the surface of the water. They would never call me to account.

There, on the sidewalk of Avenue Henri-Martin, it occurred to me that Sunday evenings in winter are as depressing in the affluent west-side neighborhoods as they are around the Ursulines and on the glacial square of the Panthéon.

I felt pressure in the pit of my stomach, a flower whose petals swelled and became suffocating. I was pinned to the ground. Fortunately, the presence of my daughters kept me anchored in the present. Otherwise, all the old Sunday evenings, with their returns to boarding school, the crossing of the Bois de Boulogne, the long-gone Neuilly riding club, the night lights in the dormitory — those Sundays would have drowned me in their odor of rotting leaves. A few lit windows in the building façades were themselves night lights that had been left burning for thirty years, in empty apartments.

The memory of Jacqueline surged from the rain puddles and lights burning to no purpose in the apartment windows. I don’t know whether she’s still alive somewhere. The last time I saw her was twenty-four years ago, in the main departure hall of the Westbahnhof in Vienna. I was about to leave that city and return to Paris, but she’d decided to stay. She probably remained awhile longer in our room on the Taubstummengasse, behind the Karlskirche, and then I suppose that she, too, must have headed off for new adventures.