Patrick Modiano - Little Jewel

She had that sceptical smile again, as if she wasn’t taken in by my lie. I was just saying whatever came into my head. I didn’t even know where the School of Oriental Languages was.

‘You look so anxious,’ she said. ‘I’d like to know what’s worrying you.’

She brought her face up close to mine, those green eyes fixed on me the whole time. She wanted to read my mind; I would slip into a sweet drowsiness, talk without stopping, and come clean about everything. And she wouldn’t need to take notes like Moreau-Badmaev.

‘I’m going to stay for a bit longer in the neighbourhood, and then that will be the end of it.’

The more she fixed me with her green eyes, the more clearly I could see myself, as if I were a separate person from myself. It was quite simple: that evening, there is a girl with brown hair, scarcely nineteen, sitting on the banquette of a café in Place Blanche. You are five foot three inches tall, and you are wearing an off-white woollen cable-knit jumper. You’re going to stay there a bit longer, and then that will be the end of it. You are there because you wanted to go back to the past one last time to try to understand. Right there, under the electric light, in Place Blanche, is where everything began. For one last time, you went back to your home country, to the beginning, to find out if there was a different path to take and if things could have turned out differently.

‘What will it be the end of?’ she asked me.

I made myself eat another mouthful to please her.

‘You should have dessert.’

‘No, thank you. But perhaps we could have a drink.’

‘I don’t think alcohol would be advisable in your case.’

I liked her sceptical smile and precise way of speaking.

‘When was the last time you got out of Paris?’

I told her that I hadn’t left Paris since I was sixteen, except for the two or three times when that fellow I’d known, Wurlitzer, took me to the beach on the North Sea.

‘You should get some fresh air from time to time. Would you like to come with me on Saturday? I have to go to Bar-sur-Aube again for three days. It would do you good. I have a house just outside the town.’

Bar-sur-Aube. I pictured the first glimmer of sunlight, the dew on the grass, a walk along the river…Names alone set me dreaming.

She asked me again if I wanted to go with her on Saturday to Bar-sur-Aube.

‘Unfortunately, I have to work in the afternoon,’ I said.

‘But I’m leaving around six in the evening.’

‘Well, it might be possible. That’s really very kind of you.’

I would ask Véra Valadier if I could leave earlier than usual. And what about the little girl? They probably wouldn’t mind if I took her off for a few days to Bar-sur-Aube.

We walked along the median strip of the boulevard. I didn’t dare ask her to stay with me again that night. I could still call Moreau-Badmaev. But what if, by chance, he wasn’t at home and was busy somewhere else until tomorrow?

She must have sensed my anxiety. She took my arm. ‘I can take you back to your place, if you’d like.’

We turned into Rue Coustou. And there, on the right, as we passed in front of the dark wooden façade of Zone Out, I saw a sign in the entrance: CINQ-VERNE, THE GIRLS AND THE GHOST TRAIN. I remembered what Frédérique had said when she told me about my mother and the accident that forced her to give up ballet and work in places like this: ‘A wounded racehorse on the way to the abattoir.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want to have a go on the ghost train?’ the pharmacist asked. Her smile was comforting. In my room, she took the bottles of medicine out of one of the pockets of her coat and placed them on the bedside table.

‘You won’t forget? I’ve written the instructions on the bottles.’ She leaned towards me. ‘You’re very pale…I think it would do you a lot of good to spend a few days outside Paris. There’s a forest near the house where we can go for some lovely walks.’

She put her hand on my forehead.

‘Lie down.’

I lay down and she told me to take off my coat.

‘I have a feeling that right now I need to keep a close eye on you.’

She took off her fur coat, and laid it over me.

‘You still don’t have any heating. You’ll have to come and spend winter in my apartment.’

She stayed sitting on the edge of the bed and again fixed me with her green eyes.

I GOT OFF the metro at Porte Maillot and followed the path that runs along the Jardin d’Acclimatation. It was cold but the sun was shining, and the sky was cloudless and blue, as it is perhaps in Morocco. All the shutters on the windows in the Valadier house were closed. Just as I was about to ring the doorbell, I noticed a letter stuck under the door. I picked it up. It was the letter I had sent on Wednesday, from the post office on Place des Abbesses. I rang the bell. No one answered.

I waited a while, sitting on the doorstep. The sun was blinding. I stood up and rang again. Then I told myself that it wasn’t worth waiting any longer. They had left. The wax seals had probably been fastened to the doors. When I was there last, I had a hunch that would happen.

I held the letter in my hand. And I felt the vertigo coming back. It had been with me since I was young, since Fossombronne, when I used to try to cross the bridge. The first time, I ran; the second time, I walked fast; the third time, I made myself walk as slowly as possible to the middle. And now, once again, I had to try to walk slowly, away from the edge, saying comforting words to myself, over and over. Bar-sur-Aube. The pharmacist. There’s a forest near the house where we can go for some lovely walks . I was walking down the path that runs along the Jardin d’Acclimatation; I was heading away from the house with the closed shutters. The feeling of vertigo was getting stronger and stronger. It was all because of the letter that had been stuck under the door for nothing and that no one would ever open. And yet I had sent it from the post office on Place des Abbesses, a post office like any other, in Paris, in France. The letters sent to me from Morocco must have stayed unopened like this one. A wrong address on the envelope, or a small spelling mistake, that’s all it would have taken for them to go astray, one after the other, and end up in some unknown post office. Unless they’d been sent back to Morocco, but even then there was already no one there anymore. They’d gone missing, like the dog.

When I got out of the metro, the sun was still shining, the blue Moroccan sky. I went to the Monoprix in Rue Fontaine and bought a bottle of mineral water and a block of hazelnut milk chocolate. I crossed Place Blanche and took the shortcut down Rue Puget.

Back in my room, I sat on the edge of the bed, facing the window. I put the bottle of mineral water on the ground and the block of chocolate on the bed. I opened one of the bottles the pharmacist had given me and poured some of the pills into the palm of my hand. Little white pills. I put them in my mouth and swallowed them, along with a mouthful straight out of the bottle. Then I munched on a piece of chocolate. And repeated the procedure a few times. They went down better with the chocolate.

At first, I had no idea where I was. White walls and an electric light. I was lying on a bed that was not my bed from Rue Coustou. There was no pillow. My head was flat on the sheet. A nurse, a brunette, brought me some yoghurt. She placed it a little way back, behind my head, on the sheet. She stood there, watching me. I said to her, ‘I can’t reach it.’ She said, ‘Give it a go. You need to make an effort.’ She left. I burst into tears.