Patrick Modiano: Paris Nocturne

*

I saw Hélène Navachine at the next meeting. The bruising had almost disappeared from Dr Bouvière’s face and he wore just a small bandaid on his right cheek. We would never find out who had beaten him up. He would never let it slip. Even the young blonde woman who got in the car with him each week would be none the wiser, I was sure of it. Men die with their secrets.

That evening I asked Hélène Navachine why she was so interested in Hindu music. She said she listened to it because it relieved her of a pressure weighing down on her and it transported her to a place where, finally, she could breathe air that was weightless and clear. And really, it was a silent music. She needed air that was lighter and she needed silence. I understood what she meant. I went with her to her piano lessons. They were mostly in the seventh arrondissement. While I waited for her I went for a walk or, on snowy or rainy afternoons, I took shelter in the café nearest the apartment building she had gone into. The lessons were an hour long. There were three or four of them a day. So, during these breaks, I would walk by myself along the abandoned buildings of the École militaire . I was afraid I would lose my memory and get lost without daring to ask the way. There were not many passers-by and what directions exactly would I ask for?

One afternoon, standing at the end of Avenue de Ségur, on the edge of the fifteenth arrondissement, I was seized by panic. I felt like I was melting into the sort of fog that signals snow. I wanted someone to take me by the arm and say soothing words to me: ‘No, no, it’s nothing, old boy… You must be tired…Let’s go and get you a cognac…You’ll be all right…’ I tried to cling to small concrete details. She had said that she tried to keep things simple for her piano lessons. She made all her students learn the same piece. It was called Bolero , by Hummel. She played it for me one night on a piano we found in the basement of a brasserie. It wouldn’t be long before I could ask her to whistle Hummel’s Bolero . A German who must have made a voyage to Spain. I’d be better off waiting for her in front of the building where she was giving a lesson. What a strange neighbourhood… a metaphysical neighbourhood, as Dr Bouvière might have said, in his voice that was so chilling and so smooth. How feeble of me to let myself get into such a state. All it took was a bit of fog with a hint of snow at the Ségur-Suffren crossroad for me to lose heart. Really, I was being pathetic. It could be the memory of snow falling that afternoon when Hélène Navachine came out of the building, but each time I think back to this period of my life, I can smell snow — or rather, a coolness that chills the lungs and ends up getting confused in my mind with the smell of ether.

One afternoon, after her piano lesson, she slipped and fell on a patch of black ice and cut her hand. It was bleeding. We found a pharmacy a little further down the road. I asked for some cotton wool and, instead of 90 per cent alcohol, I asked for a vial of ether. I don’t think it was a deliberate mistake. We were sitting on a bench. She took the lid off the vial and, as she soaked the cotton wool to apply to her cut, I was hit by the smell of the ether, so strong and so familiar from my childhood. I put the blue vial in my pocket but the smell still hung around us. It permeated the hotel rooms around Gare de Lyon where we used to end up. We would go there before she went home, or when she’d come and meet me there at around nine o’clock at night.

They didn’t ask for your papers at those hotels. There were too many people coming and going because the station was nearby. The clients wouldn’t stay long in their rooms; there would always be a train coming soon to take them away. Shadows.

We were handed forms on which to write our names and addresses, but they never checked if they matched a passport or ID card. I filled them in for both of us. I wrote different names and addresses each time. I made a note of them in a diary so I could change the names the next time. I wanted to cover our tracks as well as our real birthdates, since both of us were still minors. Last year, in an old wallet, I found the page on which I had listed our false identities.

Georges Accad 28 Rue de la Rochefoucauld, Paris 9e

Yvette Dintillac 75 Rue Laugier

André Gabison Calle Jorge Juan 17, Madrid

Jean-Maurice Jedlinski Casa Montalvo, Biarritz

and Marie-José Vasse

Jacques Piche Berlin, Steglitz, Orleanstrasse 2

Patrick de Terouane 21 Rue Berlioz, Nice

Suzy Kraay Vijzelstraat 98, Amsterdam

I was told that each hotel passed these forms on to the vice squad, where they would be arranged in alphabetical order. Apparently they have all since been destroyed, but I don’t believe it. They remain intact in their filing cabinets. One night, just to kill time, a retired police officer started leafing through these old files and he came across André Gabison’s or Marie-José Vasse’s form. He wondered why, after more than thirty years, these people remained missing, unknown at their addresses. He would never know the truth of it. A long time ago, a girl used to give piano lessons. In the hotel rooms around Gare de Lyon where we used to meet, I noticed that they still had the blackout curtains from the civil defence, even though it was many years after the war. We could hear the comings and goings in the corridor, doors slamming, phones ringing. Behind the partition walls, conversations went on late into the night; it sounded like travelling businessmen endlessly discussing their jobs. Heavy footsteps in the corridor, people carrying suitcases. And, despite the commotion, we both managed to reach the realm of silence she talked about, in which the air was lighter to breathe. After a while it felt as if we were the only people in the hotel, that everyone else had left. They had all gone to the station opposite to catch a train. The silence was so deep it made me think of the little train station in a country village near a border, lost in the snow.

I REMEMBER AT the Mirabeau Clinic, after the accident, I woke with a start and I didn’t know where I was. I tried to find the switch for the bedside lamp. Then, in the stark light, I recognised the white walls, the bay window. I tried to fall asleep again but I was disturbed and restless. All night, people were talking on the other side of the partition. A name kept coming up, in different intonations: JACQUELINE BEAUSERGENT. In the morning I realised I had been dreaming. Only the name JACQUELINE BEAUSERGENT was real, since I had heard it from her own mouth at the Hôtel-Dieu, when the fellow in the white coat had asked us who we were.

The other evening, at the south terminal of Orly airport, I was waiting for some friends who were coming back from Morocco. The plane was delayed. It was past ten o’clock. The large hall leading to the arrival gates was almost deserted. I had the odd feeling that I had arrived at a kind of no man’s land in space and time. Suddenly I heard one of those disembodied airport voices repeat three times: ‘WOULD JACQUELINE BEAUSERGENT PLEASE PROCEED TO DEPARTURE GATE 624.’ I ran the length of the hall. I didn’t know what had become of her in the past thirty years, but time no longer mattered. I was under the illusion that there could still be a departure gate for me. The last few passengers were making their way to gate 624, where a man in a dark uniform was standing guard. He asked sharply: ‘Do you have your ticket?’

‘I’m looking for someone…There was an announcement just a moment ago…Jacqueline Beausergent…’

The last passengers had disappeared. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘She must have boarded long ago, sir.’

‘Are you sure? Jacqueline Beausergent…’ I repeated.