Patrick Modiano: After the Circus

“Do you swear he didn’t mention me?”

“I swear.”

What that phantom had said no longer mattered: La Petite-Roquette, 34 Rue Desaix, and the afternoon in Neuilly when “something very serious happened.” All of it was so far removed … I had made a leap into the future.

“I think it’s better if we don’t stay at the apartment tonight.”

I tried to reassure her that we were in no danger, but she seemed so anxious, so nervous, that I finally said:

“We can go wherever you like.”

Still, it gave me a pang in the heart to see her prey to shadows and incidents that to me were already past and done. It was as if I had set sail and was watching her, far behind me, flailing against the tide.

We went back to the Quai de Conti apartment to grab the suitcases. She waited for me at the foot of the small stairway leading to the fifth floor.

Just as I opened the door to the storage closet, the phone rang. She stared at me, petrified.

“Don’t answer.”

I climbed down the stairs carrying the two suitcases and walked into the office. The phone was still ringing. I felt for it in the dark:

“Hello.”

Silence.

“Are you still in the café, Guélin?” I said.

No reply. I thought I could hear him breathing. She had picked up the listening extension. We were standing near the windows. I couldn’t help glancing toward the other bank of the Seine. Over there, the café was lit. I said:

“How’s it going, you pathetic old fuck?”

Another breath. It was like the rustle of wind in the leaves. She wanted me to hang up, grabbed the receiver and tried to wrest it from me, but she couldn’t. I kept it glued to my ear. One evening, at the same hour, in the same place, during the Occupation, my father had received a similar phone call. No one answered. It was no doubt a man much like the one from before, brown hair, balding, tan coat, who belonged to Superintendent Permilleux’s squad and was tasked with ferreting out undeclared Jews.

A crackling sound. He hung up.

“We have to get out of here right now,” she said.

She carried one of her suitcases herself, the lighter one, and we crossed the foyer. As we were about to go out, I put down the other suitcase:

“Hold on a moment. I’ll be right back …”

I ran back up the little staircase. In the fifth-floor bedroom I gathered the few books that still remained on the shelves between the two windows, among which I found To the Happy Few.

I piled them on the bed and knotted one of the sheets into a bundle. Those books had been shelved there well before my father’s arrival in the apartment. It was the previous tenant, the author of The Hunt, who had left them. Some of them bore the name, on the flyleaf, of a mysterious François Vernet.

When I came back down with my improvised bag, she was waiting on the landing.

I slammed the door shut and felt as if I were leaving that apartment forever, because of the books I was taking with me.

This time we had left the dog in the car. Seeing us, he let out a kind of howl and danced up and down on his hind legs.

We stashed the two suitcases and the bundle of books in the trunk.

“Where to?” I asked.

“To that hotel where I’d taken a room.”

I thought of the night porter, his lantern jaw and thin lips, the disdainful look he’d given us the other night. But now, I wasn’t even afraid of him anymore.

Nor was she, because she said:

“We should have given him some money and he would have looked the other way.”

I turned to her.

“Do you have enough money to go to Rome?”

“Yes. I’ve saved up thirty thousand francs.”

With the money from Dell’Aversano and the amount from Ansart, that made more than forty thousand between us.

“I’ve put half of it in one of the suitcases and I hid the rest in the house in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. I’ll have to go get it tomorrow.”

I didn’t dare ask her where that money came from. Was it her husband’s savings? Or what she had earned at 34 Rue Desaix, in that apartment the man had mentioned earlier? But none of that was important. It was past. In Rome, one spring evening, we would start living our real lives. We would have forgotten all those years of adolescence, and even the names of our parents.

We drove along the quays. The dark façade of the Gare d’Orsay, with its rusted awnings that no longer opened onto anything. And the hotel, in the same building as the station. We stopped at a red light, and I peered in at the entrance and reception desk.

She said:

“You want to take a room here?”

We would have been the only customers in that hotel, which from outside was indistinguishable from the decommissioned train station.

Sometimes I dream that I’m with her, in the middle of the reception lobby. The night porter is wearing a threadbare stationmaster’s uniform. He comes over to hand us our key. The elevator no longer works and we climb up a marble stairway. On the first floor, we try in vain to find our room. We pass through the large dining room shrouded in darkness and get lost in the corridors. We end up in an old waiting room lit by a single naked bulb in the ceiling. We sit on the only surviving bench. The station is no longer operational, but you never know: the train for Rome might pass through, by mistake, and stop for a few seconds, just long enough for us to climb aboard.

We parked the car at the corner of Avenue de Suffren and the small street where the hotel was. I carried the two suitcases, and she the bundle of books. The dog walked in front of us, off his leash.

The hotel door wasn’t closed like the first time. The same night porter was standing behind the reception desk. He didn’t recognize us right off. He cast a suspicious eye on the bundled bedsheet Gisèle was carrying and on the dog.

“We’d like a room,” said Gisèle.

“We don’t rent rooms for just one night,” said the porter in glacial tones.

“Well, then, for two weeks,” I said in a gentle voice. “And I’ll pay you in cash, if you prefer.”

I pulled from the pocket of my coat the wad of bills that Dell’Aversano had given me.

He looked interested. He said:

“I’ll have to charge half-price extra for the dog.”

It was at that moment that he recognized me. He fixed his croupier’s eye on me.

“You were here the other night … You were the young lady’s brother … Except, you still have to prove it …”

I slid a few hundred-franc bills into the breast pocket of his jacket. His gaze softened.

“Thank you, sir.”

He turned around and pulled a key from one of the cubbyholes.

“Room number 3 for you and your sister …”

He was now extending us every professional courtesy.

“It’s on the first floor.”

He handed me the key and leaned forward.

“Make no mistake … The hotel now only occupies the first floor of the building. The rest are furnished apartments.”

He smiled.

“Obviously, it’s not strictly by the book … But neither are many things in life, am I right?”

I had taken the key, a simple tin key that didn’t look like it fit a hotel room.

“For the bill, I’m afraid I can’t give you a receipt.”

He looked truly apologetic.

“Don’t give it another thought,” I said. “It’s much better this way.”

We climbed the stairs, which were covered with a worn red carpet.

Several doors on either side of the hallway. Each one bore a number written in pencil.

We went into room number 3. It was spacious and high-ceilinged. A bay window looked out on the street. The very wide bed had baby blue sheets and a plaid blanket. A small wooden staircase led up to a mezzanine. The dog lay down on the floor at the foot of the bed.