Patrick Modiano: After the Circus

Later, darkness began to fall and we were lying on the couch. She got up and put on her black skirt and pullover.

“I’m going out for cigarettes.”

She wanted me to stay in case the phone rang. I asked her to buy the evening paper.

I watched her from the window. She didn’t take the car. She walked with a languid step, hands in the pockets of her raincoat that she’d left unbuttoned.

She disappeared around the corner of the Hôtel des Monnaies.

I lay back down on the couch. I tried to recall the furniture that used to be in this office.

The telephone rang. A muffled, slightly drawling voice.

“I’m calling on behalf of Mister Samson, who asked you some questions last Thursday. A young girl was called in just after you … The two of you met up later at the Soleil-d’Or café.”

He paused. But I didn’t say anything. I felt incapable of uttering a single word.

“You have spent the last four days together and she is living at your address … I’m calling to warn you …”

The office was now half in shadow and he continued speaking in his muffled voice.

“There is a lot you don’t know about this person … I suppose she even lied to you about her name … Her real name is Suzanne Kraay …”

He spelled out the name, mechanically: K-R-A-A-Y. It felt as if the voice I was hearing was prerecorded, like the talking clock.

“She has already committed several offenses that landed her in La Petite-Roquette for a few months … But I don’t imagine she told you any of that … She probably also didn’t tell you she’s married …”

“I’m aware,” I said, in a voice I tried to make curt.

There was a pause.

“You are certainly not aware of everything.”

“I’m not interested,” I told him.

“But I am interested, and you’re forgetting that you’re still a minor …”

Once again the voice was muffled, distant.

“And you’re running a huge risk …”

I heard the crackling of static, as if my caller were standing at the far end of the world. Then the noise stopped and his voice came through, very near and distinct.

“I’d like to give you a quick rundown so that we can clear the air. It’s in your interest. You should know what you’re exposing yourself to, since you’re a minor … Will you agree to meet me?”

He had spoken that last sentence in the tone, at once obsequious and authoritarian, used by certain boarding school supervisors.

“All right,” I said.

“This evening, ten o’clock, near your building … In the café on the quay, opposite the Louvre Colonnade … You can see it from your windows … I’ll expect you at ten … I’m Mister Guélin.”

He spelled his name, then hung up.

I hung up in turn. Before he’d introduced himself, his voice had reminded me of a man I used to run into on Saturdays, when I went to the Jardin du Luxembourg or the Danton cinema. He always wore a gray sweat suit and had just come from the gym. A blond man of about forty, with close-cropped hair and sunken cheeks. One afternoon, he had struck up a conversation with me in one of those sorry cafés on the Carrefour de l’Odéon. He was a writer and journalist. I told him that I, too, hoped to become a writer one day. At which point he had given me a condescending smile:

“It’s a lot of work, you know … A lot of work … I don’t think you have what it takes …”

And he cited the example of a famous young dancer whom he greatly admired, who “worked at the barre day in, day out.”

“That’s what it means to write, you see … Twenty-four hours of exercise a day … I doubt you have the strength of character … It’s not even worth trying.”

He had almost persuaded me.

“I can show you how I write …”

He invited me to visit him at his place on Rue du Dragon. Two rooms with chalk-white walls, exposed beams in dark wood, a rustic writing table of the same color, and very stiff seats with high backs. He was wearing his sweat suit. He had signed one of his books for me, whose title I’ve forgotten. To my great surprise, he recommended I read The Girls by Montherlant. Then he’d offered to drive me home in his car, a Dauphine Gordini. Over the following months, I had seen him from my window, at night, parked in front of the building in that blue car with white trim. And I was afraid.

I checked to see if by chance it was there today.

But no. Silence. Night had fallen. I preferred the reflections of the streetlamps on the walls to the dim light of the bulb hanging from the ceiling. Once again, I feared Gisèle would never return. The voice I had heard on the phone only heightened my sense of isolation and abandonment. It corresponded so well to this empty office, where I was having trouble remembering where the furniture used to be.

La Petite-Roquette … I had been walking one day on the street of the same name and had passed by the prison. Often, in my dreams, Rue de la Roquette spills onto the kind of square you find in Rome, in the middle of which rises a fountain. It’s always summer. The square is deserted and flattened by the sun. Nothing disturbs the silence but the murmur of the fountain. And I remain there, in the shadows, waiting for Gisèle to walk out of prison.

The entry door slammed: I recognized her footsteps. She was there, in front of me, in her unbuttoned raincoat. She switched on the light. She said I was making a strange face.

“That man called.”

“And?”

I told her it was someone wanting information about my father and that he’d made an appointment to see me later that evening, at ten, in the café just opposite, across the Seine.

“It shouldn’t take long.”

I took her face in my hands and kissed her. It didn’t matter if her name was Gisèle or Suzanne Kraay and if she’d served time in La Petite-Roquette. Had I known her back then, I wouldn’t have missed a single opportunity to go visit her. And even if she had committed a crime, I didn’t care, so long as she was alive, pressed against me, in her black skirt and pullover.

“Aren’t you worried he’ll walk in on us?” she whispered in my ear.

At first I thought she meant the man on the telephone. But she was talking about Grabley.

“Oh, no. He’s at the Tomate …”

Even so, we pushed the couch so that it blocked the office door.

I could see the café lights shining from the other side of the Seine, at the corner of the quay. Was the man already there? I wished I had a very powerful pair of binoculars to watch him with. He, too, from the café, could check whether the lights were on in the apartment windows. And that thought caused me a sudden stab of anxiety, as if a trap had just closed on me.

“What are you looking at?”

She was lying on the couch. Her skirt and pullover were thrown on the coffee table.

“I’m watching for the tour boat,” I told her.

I cracked open the window. The Quai de Conti remained empty for a long while, the time it took for the traffic lights to turn green, over toward the Pont-Neuf. And before the next few cars appeared, there was silence, no doubt the same silence my father had known on evenings during the Occupation, behind this same window.

At that time, the café opposite didn’t shine and the Louvre Colonnade was shrouded in darkness. The advantage, today, was knowing where the danger lay: that light across the Seine.

I looked at my watch. A quarter to ten.

“I have to go to my appointment.”

She was sitting on the edge of the couch. She leaned her chin in the palms of her hands.

“Do you have to go?”

“If I don’t, he’ll only call back … Might as well get rid of him once and for all.”