Patrick Modiano - Little Jewel

‘Do you often drink spirits?’

‘No. Not often. Only tonight, so I could pluck up the courage to talk.’

I would show him the photo from The Crossroad of the Archers that I had filed away at the bottom of the metal tin. I avoided looking at it. I was wearing a nightshirt, wide-eyed, an electric torch in my hand, and I was wandering around the corridors of the château. I’d left my room because of the storm.

‘There’s one thing I don’t understand. Why did your mother leave you and go to Morocco?’

It was odd to hear someone asking these questions, when up until now I had been the only one to ask them of myself. Sometimes, in the Fossombronne house, I had overheard snatches of conversation between Frédérique and her friends. They thought I was out of earshot or that I was too young to understand. Some words have remained etched in my memory — especially those of the brunette, the one who had known my mother from the early days and who didn’t like her. One day I heard her say, ‘It’s lucky Sonia left Paris in time…’ I must have been thirteen and I was puzzled, but I didn’t dare ask Frédérique to explain.

‘I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘I think she went there with someone.’

Yes, she’d been taken there by a man, or he’d asked her to join him there. Was it Jean Borand? I don’t think so. He would have suggested that I go along, too. One evening, while Frédérique was out, the women were talking about my mother again, and the brunette said, ‘Sonia went out with some very weird types.’ One of them had paid — so she said—‘for Sonia to be in a movie’. I realised it was The Crossroad of the Archers .

One afternoon in summer, I’d gone for a walk in the forest with Frédérique. We went down Chemin du Bréau, which led to the forest. I asked her why, out of the blue, my mother had ended up in the huge apartment. Apparently, she had met someone and he had set her up there. But nobody ever knew what his name was. He was probably the one who took her to Morocco. Later on, I imagined a faceless man carrying suitcases at night. Secret meetings in hotel lobbies, on railway platforms, and always under the bluish tinge of a streetlight. Trucks being loaded in empty garages, like Jean Borand’s, near the Gare de Lyon. And the smell of rotting leaves and decomposition, the smell of the Bois de Boulogne on the evening when she lost the dog.

It must have been late, because the waiter came over to tell us that it was closing time.

‘Do you want to come back to my place?’ Moreau-Badmaev asked.

Perhaps he’d sensed what was on my mind. At the prospect of finding myself alone that night in Porte d’Orléans, I’d again felt something pressing down on me, preventing me from breathing.

Back at his apartment, he offered me a hot drink. I heard him opening and shutting a cupboard, boiling water; then there was the sound of a saucepan banging. If I lay on the mattress for a second, I would feel better. A warm, hazy light emanated from the globe in the tripod. I would have liked to turn on the radio set to see the green light. Now that I was lying down, my head on the pillow — a much softer pillow than I was used to at Rue Coustou — I felt as if someone had removed a metal or plaster corset from my chest. I wanted to spend all day like that, far from Paris, in the Midi, or in Rome, with sunlight filtering through the slats of the louvres.

He came into the room holding a tray. I sat up. I was embarrassed.

‘No, no, stay where you are,’ he said, and put the tray on the ground, at the foot of the mattress.

He handed me a cup. Then he pushed the pillow behind me and wedged it against the wall so I could lean back on it.

‘You should take off your coat.’

I wasn’t even aware that I still had my coat on. And my shoes. I put the cup down on the floor next to me. He helped me take off my coat and shoes. When he took off my shoes, I felt a huge relief, as if he’d removed the sort of leg irons that slaves and people on death row wear around their ankles. I thought of my mother’s ankles, which I’d had to massage and which had forced her to give up classical dance. All the failure and misery of her life were contained in those ankles, and the pain must have ended up spreading through her whole body. Now I understood her better. He held out the cup to me again.

‘Jasmine tea. I hope you like it.’

I must have looked pretty dreadful for him to be speaking so gently, almost in a whisper. I nearly asked him if I looked sick, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I preferred not knowing.

‘I get the impression that you’re preoccupied by your childhood memories,’ he said.

It all started with the woman wearing the yellow coat in the metro. Before that, I scarcely gave them a thought.

I swallowed a mouthful of tea. It was less bitter than the whisky.

He had got out his writing pad.

‘You can trust me. I’m used to making sense of everything, even foreign languages, and yours is not that foreign to me.’

He seemed moved to have made this declaration. And I was moved, too.

‘From what I can gather, you never found out who rented the huge apartment to your mother…’

I remember there was a cupboard in the living-room wall, at the spot where the steps covered in white plush formed a sort of dais. My mother would open the built-in cupboard and get out a wad of banknotes. I had also seen her give a wad to Jean Borand, one Thursday when he came to collect me. Apparently, there was enough in the treasure trove to last until the end, until the day she drove me to the Gare d’Austerlitz. Even that day, before I got on the train, she slipped an envelope into my suitcase; it contained several of those wads of notes. ‘Give them to Frédérique, so that she looks after you.’

I wondered later where she had got hold of all that money. From the same man who had provided her with the apartment? The one whose name no one ever knew? Or what he looked like? Try as I might to dredge up a memory of him, I was sure I had never known any man who came as a regular visitor to the apartment. And it couldn’t have been Jean Borand, since she was giving him money. Perhaps that fellow was my father, after all. But he didn’t want to be seen; he wanted to remain an unknown father. He must have come very late at night, around three in the morning, while I was asleep. I often woke in the middle of the night and, every time, I was sure I heard loud voices. My bedroom was quite close to my mother’s. Twelve years later, I would have been curious to know how she felt, that first evening, when she arrived in the apartment, after leaving her hotel room in Rue d’Armaillé. Would she have felt that she was turning the tables on life? She had not been able to become a prima ballerina, and now, under a new identity, she wanted to have a role in a film by dragging me along with her, like a performing dog. And, from what I had gleaned at Frossombronne, listening to the conversations, it was the man whose name no one knew who had financed the film for her.

‘Do you mind?’

He stood up and leaned over the radio. He turned a knob and the green light came on.

‘I have to listen to a program tonight…For my work… But I’ve lost track of what time it starts.’

He turned the dial slowly, as if he was looking for a station that was difficult to tune into. Someone was speaking in a guttural language, and there was a long silence between each sentence.

‘There — that’s it.’

As the sentences followed, one after the other, he took notes on his pad.

‘He’s announcing the evening’s programs…The broadcast I’m interested in is on later.’