Patrick Modiano: Paris Nocturne

And now, there I was at Les Calanques sitting at a table covered with a red tablecloth, and fish waterzooi was on the menu. Over by the window, there were stifled bursts of laughter. One of the two men had put on a black astrakhan hat. His glasses and thin French face contrasted with the Russian or Polish lancer’s hat. A shapka. Yes, it was called a shapka. He leaned over to the blonde woman sitting next to him to kiss her on the shoulder, but she didn’t let him. The others laughed. With the best will in the world I would not have been able to join in their laughter. If I’d gone over to their table, I don’t believe they would have seen me and, if I’d spoken to them, they wouldn’t even have heard the sound of my voice. I tried to hold on to concrete details. Les Calanques, 4 Rue de la Coutellerie. Perhaps my uneasiness came from the topographical position of the street. It led down to the large buildings of the police headquarters on the banks of the Seine. There was no light in any of the windows of those buildings. I stayed sitting at the table, to delay the moment when I’d end up alone again in that area. Even the thought of the lights of Place du Châtelet gave me no comfort. Nor the thought of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois further along the deserted quays. The other man had taken off his shapka and was mopping his brow. No one came to take my order. But I would have been incapable of swallowing a thing. Fish Waterzooi in a restaurant called Les Calanques…There was something unsettling about this combination. I was less and less sure that I could overcome the distress of Sunday nights.

*

Outside, I wondered if I ought to go and wait for the night bus again. But I was overcome with panic at the prospect of going back to my hotel room alone. The Porte d’Orléans neighbourhood suddenly seemed bleak, perhaps because it reminded me of a recent past: the silhouette of my father walking away towards Montrouge as if to meet a firing squad, and of all our missed meetings at the Zeyer, the Rotonde and the Terminus in this hinterland…That was the time of evening I would have most needed Hélène Navachine’s company. I would have found it reassuring to go back to my room with her and we could even have made the journey on foot through the dead Sunday-night streets. We would have laughed harder than the fellow in the shapka and his friends earlier at Les Calanques.

I tried to muster some courage by telling myself that not everything was that gloomy in the Porte d’Orléans neighbourhood. On summer days there, the great bronze lion would sit under the foliage and each time I looked at him from a distance, his presence on the horizon reassured me. He kept watch over the past, but also over the future. That night, the lion would be a landmark for me. I trusted this sentinel.

I quickened my pace as far as Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. When I reached the arcades of Rue de Rivoli, it was as if I had suddenly been woken up. Les Calanques… The guy in the shapka who tried to kiss the blonde woman… Walking the length of the arcades, I felt as though I had reached open air again. To the left was the Palais du Louvre and, just up ahead, the Tuileries Gardens of my childhood. As I made my way towards Place de la Concorde, I would try to picture what was on the other side of the railings in the darkness: the first ornamental lake, the open-air theatre, the merry-go-round, the second ornamental lake…Just a few more steps and I would breathe in the sea air. Straight ahead. And the lion at the end, seated, keeping watch, in the middle of the crossroad…That night, the city was more mysterious than usual. I had never experienced such a profound silence around me. Not a single car. A moment later, I would cross Place de la Concorde without a thought about green or red lights, just as one would cross a prairie. I was in a dream again, but a more peaceful one than earlier at Les Calanques. The car appeared just as I reached Place des Pyramides and the pain in my leg told me I was about to wake up.

IN THE ROOM at the Mirabeau Clinic, after the accident, I had time to think things over. First of all, I remembered the dog that had been run over one afternoon when I was a child; then an episode from the same period came back to me little by little. I think I’d avoided dwelling on it until then. Only the smell of ether would bring it back to me occasionally, that monochromatic smell that carries you to a fragile tipping point between life and death. Coolness and the impression of finally breathing in the open air, but also, sometimes, the weight of a shroud. The previous night, at the Hôtel-Dieu, when the fellow put a muzzle over my face to send me to sleep, I remembered that I had gone through it all before. The same night, the same accident, the same smell of ether.

It was outside a school. The playground looked out onto an avenue on a slight incline, lined with trees and houses, but I no longer knew if they were mansions, country houses or detached suburban houses. Throughout my childhood, I had stayed in so many different places that I ended up getting them confused in my mind. My memory of this avenue had perhaps become mixed up with that of an avenue in Biarritz or of a sloping road in Jouy-en-Josas. During the same period, I had lived in both places, and I think the dog was run over on Rue Docteur-Kurzenne, in Jouy-en-Josas.

I was leaving class at the end of the afternoon. It must have been winter. It was dark. I was waiting on the pavement for someone to come and collect me. Soon there was no one else left. The school gate was closed. There was no light at the windows. I didn’t know the way home. I tried to cross the avenue, but as soon as I stepped off the pavement a van braked suddenly and knocked me down. My ankle was injured. They laid me down in the back of the van under the tarpaulin. One of the two men from the van was with me. As the engine started up, a woman got in. I knew her. We lived in the same house. I can still see her face. She was young, about twenty-five, blonde or light brown hair, a scar on her cheek. She leaned over me and held my hand. She was out of breath, as if she had been running. She was explaining to the man next to us that she was late because her car had broken down. She said to him that she came from Paris . The van stopped alongside the railings of a garden. One of the men carried me and we crossed the garden. She kept hold of my hand. We went into the house. I was laid down on a bed. A room with white walls. Two nuns leaned over me, their faces taut in their white wimples. They put the same black muzzle over my nose as the one at the Hôtel-Dieu. And before falling asleep, I smelled the monochromatic odour of ether.

*

That afternoon, once I’d left the clinic, I followed the quay towards Pont de Grenelle. I was trying to remember what had happened back then, when I woke up at the convent. After all, the white-walled room where I had been taken looked like the one at the Mirabeau Clinic. And the smell of ether was the same as at the Hôtel-Dieu. That could help me get to the bottom of it. They say that smells bring back the past best, and the smell of ether always had a curious effect on me. It seemed to be the very essence of my childhood, but as it was bound up with sleep and the numbing of pain, the images that it unveiled clouded over again almost simultaneously. It was surely because of this that my childhood memories were so confused. Ether made me both remember and forget.

Outside school, the van with the tarpaulin, the convent…I searched for other details. I could see myself next to the woman in a car: she opened a door, the car went down a driveway…She had a room on the first floor of the house, the last one at the end of the corridor. But these fragments of memory were so vague that I couldn’t hold on to them. Only her face was clear, with the scar on her cheek, and I was truly convinced that it was the same face as the one from the other night, at the Hôtel-Dieu.