Patrick Modiano: Young Once

•

Bellune’s gaze, as he stood at the window, rested on her the moment she crossed the street and stayed on her for several seconds. Then she disappeared into the crowds of the Champs-Élysées.

She walked down the avenue and, since it was starting to rain, stepped under the Arcades du Lido. A woman leaving a store jostled her; farther on, she passed a man who smiled at her. He turned around, followed her, and approached her when she left the gallery.

“Are you alone? Do you want to come have a drink with me?”

She immediately looked away and hurried down the street. The man tried to catch up to her but stopped under the entrance to the Lido. She walked farther, and he didn’t let her out of his sight, as though he had made a bet he could keep her in sight for as long as possible. Small groups of people came out of a movie theater. He could still see her chestnut-brown hair and the back of her raincoat, and before long she had blended in with the others.

She went into the Sinfonia. At that time of day, there were lots of customers. She slipped to the back of the store. She chose a record and gave it to the salesman so he could let her listen to it. She waited for one of the booths to be free and sat down, putting the little headphones over her ears. A silence like cotton wool. She forgot the hustle and bustle around her. Now she lets the singer’s voice envelop her, and she closes her eyes. She dreams that one day she will no longer walk around in this crowd, in this suffocating racket. One day, she will burst through this screen of noise and indifference and be nothing but a voice, a clear voice, set free, like the one she is listening to at this moment.

•

At the Iéna Métro exit, she walked down the street to the Seine along the Trocadéro gardens. Bellune lived a little farther down, on one of the streets perpendicular to the Quai de Passy.

The apartment, on the top floor, had a deck upstairs from which you could see the roofs of the neighborhood, the Seine, and the Eiffel Tower. Bellune had arranged chairs and a table along the edge of the deck, by a white banister like a ship’s railing.

The living-room windows looked out onto the street and the furniture consisted of a long table, a leather armchair, and an upright piano. A hallway led to Bellune’s room. On the left wall of the hall, there was a little poster the size of a playbill, on which it said:

HAWAII ROSE

BY

GEORG BLUENE

with

GUSTI HORBER

AND

OSCAR HAWELKA

The letters of the title were interwoven with garlands of roses. Above the title was a medallion containing a photograph of a dark and handsome young man, in which she recognized Bellune.

“Is that you?”

He didn’t answer. The next day, they were eating dinner in the restaurant on Square de l’Alboni — they always had dinner in a neighborhood restaurant, as if Bellune was afraid to stray too far from where he lived — and he gave her a partial explanation. At twenty-three, when he still lived in Austria, he had written the music for that operetta, a huge success in Vienna, where he was born, and then in Berlin too. But as bad luck would have it, the launch of his career coincided with the Nazis’ arrival in power. A few years later, he’d had to leave Austria for France, and he had never written music again. He made do with working in radio and then for the record company. He described it all indifferently, as though it had happened to someone other than him.

After dinner, he would sometimes take her to a club where amateurs were performing. Bellune would be disappointed by the acts but, to satisfy his conscience, he would stay to the end. One night, at a place empty of customers near the Sacré-Coeur — on rue du Chevalier-de-la-Barre, to be exact: the street had an intriguing name — the show was performed for just the two of them. Under dim lights, a singer with bleached-blond hair wearing a sky-blue suit was throttling his electric guitar while bobbing his head up and down. Bellune, impassive, kept his eyes fixed on him. Then a little brunette in a white lace dress started to sing a lullaby. Between each number, a presenter, with the air of an absentminded street vendor, tossed out a few witty remarks. A tall girl with a bulging forehead, her face and bust like the figurehead of a ship, interpreted some sea shanties. And then it was a chubby, grinning woman’s turn; she performed a string of long-winded jokes. The light turned orange, opal, turquoise, and Bellune congratulated the artists. The evening made a deep impression on Odile.

It must have been from watching him surreptitiously under the lights, and finding him mysterious, even handsome, like the young man in the medallion, the one who had written, in Vienna, the music for Hawaii Rose.

•

She ended up wondering what would happen to her without him and feeling lost whenever he was not by her side.

One night, when she was going to Bellune’s apartment later than usual, policemen were stopping cars and checking drivers’ and passengers’ IDs. She saw them from a distance but didn’t dare tell the taxi driver to let her out so she could avoid them.

At a uniformed man’s gesture, the taxi pulled over to the sidewalk. She rummaged in her bag for her passport and handed it through the lowered window.

“You’re a minor…”

The agent made a sign for her to get out. She paid the fare, and the taxi driver indifferently handed back her change, without even turning around.

The police van was parked a little farther away, in the side alley off boulevard Berthier. They pushed her inside.

“A minor.”

“How old?”

“Nineteen.”

Inside, there were two men in uniform and a fat blond man in civilian clothes. He examined her passport.

“Do you live with your parents?”

“No.”

“Are you a student?”

“No.”

The door slammed shut; the driver turned the van around and took boulevard Berthier. She was wedged between the two uniformed cops. The fat blond man, sitting on the bench across from her, looked at her and casually waved her passport back and forth like a fan.

“What are you doing out at this hour?”

She didn’t answer. Anyway, he had asked the question in a tired voice, purely for form’s sake. He did not seem interested in the answer.

“Stop on rue Le Châtelier a second,” he told the driver.

He slipped the passport into his jacket pocket. The police van made a right turn into a little street, slowed, and stopped.

The fat blond stood up and got out. Since he didn’t shut the van door behind him, she saw him go into one of the buildings through a glass and wrought-iron door. On the wall, a lit sign said: GOURGAUD RESIDENCE.

For a brief moment she thought about trying to escape. One of the uniformed policemen had gotten out of the van too and was pacing up and down the sidewalk. The other was sitting on the bench across from her and had closed his eyes. But how could she get her passport back? The cop on the sidewalk would stop her anyway.

Suddenly she felt tired. The two windows on the ground floor of the Gourgaud Residence were lit and she could see through the left one a green plant whose large leaves stuck to the window like suction cups.

“You want a cigarette?”

The cop held out his packet. She said no.

“Do you think they’ll keep me here a long time?”

“I don’t know.”

He had shrugged his shoulders. He was young, twenty-five at most, and seemed tired. He sucked on his cigarette in a sly, shifty way, holding it pinched it between his thumb and index finger.

The fat blond came out of the Gourgaud Residence with another man, very tall, with a cane. The cop in uniform who was pacing outside climbed back into the van at once, as though he had to leave them alone together, and sat down next to her. The two men on the sidewalk were talking in very loud voices and occasionally burst out laughing. She could hear scraps of their conversation. It was about someone named Paul.