Patrick Modiano: After the Circus

We had dinner there. At first, I was afraid Grabley and Sylvette might show up, but I told myself they preferred noisier places. I recognized the man in the white jacket who served us, from the rare times I used to eat there with my mother, on Sunday evenings after her performance.

When we walked in, he was sitting at a table doing a crossword puzzle. I wondered if the music was coming from a speaker at the back of the room or from a radio: music with the lunar sound of a hammered dulcimer.

The dog stretched out at my feet. I petted him to reassure myself he was really there. I was sitting across from her. I didn’t take my eyes off her. I ran my hand over her face. Once again, I felt a stab of fear that she would vanish.

As of that evening, we had cut all our ties. Nothing around us was real anymore. Not Grabley, not my father lost in Switzerland, not my mother, somewhere in the south of Spain, not those people I had met and about whom I knew nothing: Ansart, Jacques de Bavière … The restaurant dining room was also stripped of any reality, like one of those places you frequented long ago and revisit in a dream.

After leaving the Gavarny, my mother and I used to take the number 67 bus at Place Pigalle, which dropped us off at the Quai du Louvre. Just three years since then, and already it was another lifetime … Only the man in the white jacket remained at his post. I would have liked to talk to him, but what could he have told me?

“Pinch me so I know I’m not dreaming …”

She pinched my cheek.

“Harder.”

She burst out laughing. And her laugh echoed in the empty dining room. I asked if she, too, felt as if she were in a dream.

“Yes, sometimes.”

The man in the white jacket had plunged back in to his crossword puzzle. There wouldn’t be any more customers tonight.

She had taken my hand and was looking at me with her pale blue eyes, smiling.

She raised her hand and pinched my cheek, even harder than the other times.

“Wake up …”

The man stood up from his chair and went to turn on the radio behind the bar. A musical theme, then the voice of an announcer reading a news bulletin. I could make out only the timbre of the voice, like background noise.

“So, are you awake?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’d rather keep it vague.”

On Sunday evenings, in the boarding school dormitory after our return from holidays, the proctor would turn out the lights at a quarter to nine and it would take a while for sleep to come. I would wake with a start during the night, not knowing where I was. The night-light bathing the rows of bunks in a bluish glow yanked me back to reality. And since that time, whenever I’ve dreamed, I’ve tried to hold off the moment of waking for fear of finding myself back in that dormitory. I tried to explain this to her.

“Me too,” she said, “that often happens to me … I’m afraid of waking up in jail …”

I asked her why in jail? But she seemed embarrassed, and finally answered:

“That’s just how it is …”

Outside, I paused. Going back to the Quai de Conti just seemed too tedious. I would have preferred for us to be in a place that didn’t trigger any past associations. But she said none of that mattered, as long as we were together.

We drive down Rue Blanche. Once more, I feel like I’m in a dream. And in this dream, I experience a sensation of euphoria. The car glides along without my hearing the sound of the engine, as if it were coasting down the slope in idle.

On Avenue de l’Opéra, the lights and empty street open before us. She turns toward me:

“We can leave tomorrow, if you like.”

For the first time in my life, I feel as if the obstacles and constraints holding me back have been removed. Perhaps this is just an illusion that will evaporate tomorrow morning. I lower the window and the cold air heightens my euphoria. Not the slightest fog, the slightest halo around the streetlamps sparkling down the avenue.

We cross the Pont du Carrousel and, in my memory, we follow the quay against traffic, ignoring the one-way signs; we pass by the Pont des Arts, driving slowly, with no cars coming in the opposite direction.

Grabley isn’t there yet. We cross through the foyer and the apartment detaches itself from the past. I enter it for the first time. It’s she who guides me. Ahead of me she climbs the small staircase leading to the fifth floor. In the bedroom, we don’t put on the light.

The lamps along the quay project a beam of light on the ceiling as bright as the kind that, in summer, filters through the slats of the venetian blinds. She is stretched out on the bed, in her black skirt and pullover.

The next morning, when we left the apartment, Grabley still hadn’t come back. We had decided to return the car to Ansart and never see them again, him and Jacques de Bavière. We planned to leave for Rome as soon as possible.

We tried calling them, but no one answered the phone at Ansart’s, nor at Jacques de Bavière’s supposed residence. Too bad. We were leaning toward just abandoning the car on Rue Raffet.

It was a sunny autumn day, like the day before. I felt a sense of lightness and well-being at the thought of our departure. I would be leaving behind only things that were starting to fall apart: Grabley, the empty apartment … I just needed to find the authorization form I had used the previous year for a trip to Belgium, and I’d alter the date and destination. In Rome, I could certainly manage to avoid the French authorities and my draft obligations.

She told me there was no problem with her leaving France. I tried to find out more about this husband she’d mentioned.

She hadn’t seen him in a long time — nearly three months by now. She had gotten married on a whim. But who was he, exactly?

She looked me in the eye with a tight smile and said:

“Oh, kind of a strange guy … He runs a circus …”

I wasn’t sure if she was joking or telling the truth.

She seemed to be watching for my reaction.

“A circus?”

“Yes, a circus …”

He had left on tour with the circus, but she hadn’t wanted to go with him.

“I don’t like talking about this …”

And there was silence between us all the way until we arrived at the building on Rue Raffet.

We rang at the door of the apartment. No one answered.

“They might be at the restaurant,” said Gisèle.

A woman was staring at us, at the entrance to the courtyard. She walked up to us.

“Are you looking for somebody?”

Her tone was curt, as if she were suspicious of us.

“Mister Ansart,” Gisèle said.

“Mister Ansart left very early this morning. He gave me the keys to his apartment. He won’t be back for at least three months.”

So this was the concierge.

“He didn’t say where he was going?” asked Gisèle.

“No.”

“And there’s no place we can write to him?”

“He said he’d send me his new address. If you want to write him, you can leave the letter with me.”

Her tone had softened a bit. She watched after us as we crossed back through the courtyard with the dog. She seemed to find “Mister Ansart’s” departure perfectly normal. Eventually, she would ask herself about that man who seemed so pleasant and well-mannered. After that, others would ask, perhaps in the same office where Gisèle and I had been questioned. They would ask her to remember the smallest details about Ansart, who came to visit him. And she would remember that soon after his disappearance, a young man and young woman with a dog had rung at the apartment.

“What should we do with the car?” I asked Gisèle.

“We’ll keep it.”

She rummaged in the glove compartment and pulled out the registration. It was in the name of Pierre Louis Ansart, born January 22, 1921, in Paris 10th, residing 14 Rue Raffet, Paris 16th.