Patrick Modiano: Paris Nocturne

It was suddenly very cold, a dry cold that added a sharpness and clarity to everything around us: the white light of the streetlamps, the red traffic lights, the new façades of the buildings. In the silence, I thought I heard the steady footsteps of someone approaching.

She squeezed my wrist, just like the other night in the police van.

‘Are you feeling better?’ she asked.

Place du Trocadéro was much more vast and deserted than usual because of the moonlight. Crossing it would take forever, and the slowness felt good. I was sure that, if I looked at the black windows, I would be able to penetrate the darkness of the apartments, as if I could perceive infrared and ultraviolet light. But I didn’t have to go to the trouble. I just had to let myself glide down the hill I had walked up the other night with the dog.

‘I also tried to find you,’ she said, ‘but they didn’t have your address at the clinic…Paris is big…You have to be careful…People like us end up getting lost.’

After the Palais de Chaillot, she turned right and we passed alongside huge buildings, which looked abandoned. I no longer knew which city I was in. It was a city whose inhabitants had just deserted it, but it didn’t matter at all. I was no longer alone in the world. The road became steeper as it ran down to the Seine. I recognised Avenue Albert-de-Mun, the garden around the aquarium and the white façade of the apartment building. She parked in front of the porte-cochère.

‘You should come and see the apartment. It’s on the top floor. There’s a big terrace and a view over the whole of Paris.’

‘And what if Solière comes back unexpectedly?’

Each time I pronounced this phantom’s name, I wanted to laugh. All I had was the memory of a man in a dark coat in the police van, then in the foyer of the clinic, and in the café on the quay. Was it worth finding out more about him? I sensed that he was the same breed as my father and all his cronies I used to see long ago. You’ll never know anything about those people. You’d have to consult police reports written about them, but those reports, written in such precise and clear language, all contradicted each other. What was the point? For some time, so many things had been teeming around in my poor head, and the accident had been such a big deal for me…

‘Don’t worry. There’s no chance of him coming back now. And even if he did, he’s not a nasty man, you know…’

She burst out laughing again.

‘Has he lived here long?’

‘I’m not sure exactly.’

She seemed to be teasing me. I pointed out that he wasn’t in the phone book at the address on Avenue Albert-de-Mun.

‘It’s crazy,’ she said, ‘how much trouble you’ve gone to for all these details. Anyway, Solière isn’t his real name. It’s the name he uses for everyday life.’

‘Do you know his real name?’

‘Morawski.’

The name sounded familiar, but I didn’t know why. Perhaps it was in my father’s address book.

‘Even under the name Morawski, you wouldn’t find anything in the phone book. Do you think it’s all that important?’

She was right. I didn’t really want to look in the phone book anymore.

*

I remember that we walked along the pathways of the garden, around the aquarium. I needed to breathe the open air. Normally, I lived in a kind of controlled asphyxiation — or, rather, I’d got used to taking shallow breaths, as if I had to ration oxygen. Above all, you have to resist the panic that takes hold of you when you’re afraid of suffocating. Continue to take short, even breaths and wait for the straightjacket crushing your lungs to be removed, or for it to gradually crumble of its own accord.

But that night, in the garden, I breathed deeply for the first time in a long time, since Fossombronne-la-Forêt, the period of my life I had forgotten.

We arrived in front of the aquarium. We could hardly make out the building in the half-light. I asked her if she’d ever been inside. Never.

‘Well, I’ll take you one of these days…’

It was a comfort to make plans. She had taken my arm and I imagined all the multicoloured fish, close to us, circling behind the glass in the darkness and silence. My leg was painful and I limped slightly. But she, too, had the graze on her forehead. I wondered towards what future we were headed. I had the impression that we had already walked together in the same place, at the same time of day, in another time. Walking along these pathways, I no longer really knew where I was. We were almost at the top of the hill. Above us, the dark mass of one of the wings of the Palais de Chaillot. Or, rather, a big hotel in a winter sports station in Engadin. I had never breathed such cold, soft air. It penetrated my lungs with velvet freshness. Yes, we must have been in the mountains, at high altitude.

‘You’re not cold?’ she asked. ‘Perhaps we could go back…’

She drew in the upturned collar of her coat. Go back where? I hesitated for a few seconds. But of course, back to the building at the end of the avenue that ran down towards the Seine. I asked if she planned on staying there long. About a month.

‘And Morawski?’

‘Oh, he’ll be away from Paris the whole time.’

Again, the name seemed familiar. Had I heard my father say it? I thought about the fellow who had called me that day from the Hôtel Palym and whose voice was interrupted by the static on the line. Guy Roussotte. We had an office with your father, he had said. Roussotte. Morawski. He, too, had an office apparently. They all had offices.

I asked what it was that she could possibly do for this Morawski who was called Solière in everyday life. ‘I want to know more. I think there’s something you’re hiding from me.’

She remained silent. Then she said abruptly, ‘Not at all, I’ve nothing to hide. Life is far simpler than you think.’

She addressed me with the familiar tu for the first time. She squeezed my arm and we walked alongside the aquarium building. The air was still just as cold and easy to breathe. Before crossing the avenue, I stopped on the edge of the pavement. I contemplated the car in front of the apartment building. When I came here the other night, it had looked abandoned and the avenue deserted, as if no one came this way anymore.

She said again that there was a big terrace and a view overlooking the whole of Paris. The lift climbed slowly. Her hand was resting on my shoulder and she whispered something in my ear. The timer-light went out. There was nothing above us but the glow of a night-light.

PATRICK MODIANO, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1945, and was educated in Annecy and Paris. He published his first novel, La Place de l’Etoile , in 1968. In 1978, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for Rue des Boutiques Obscures (published in English as Missing Person ), and in 1996 he received the Grand Prix National des Lettres for his body of work. Mr. Modiano’s other writings include a book-length interview with the writer Emmanuel Berl and, with Louis Malle, the screenplay for Lacombe Lucien .

PHOEBE WESTON-EVANS is a freelance translator and editor.