Patrick Modiano: Paris Nocturne

He was blocking the way. ‘You can see very well there’s no one left, sir.’

EVERYTHING ABOUT THE period before the accident is confused in my memory. Days merged into one another in a haze. I was waiting for the voltage to increase to see more clearly. When I think back to it now, only Hélène Navachine’s silhouette emerges from the fog. I remember she had a beauty spot on her left shoulder. She told me she was going to London for a few days because she’d been offered a job there and she was going to find out if it was really what she wanted.

I went with her the evening she caught the train at Gare du Nord. She sent me a postcard telling me that she would soon be coming back to Paris. But she never came back. Three years ago, I received a telephone call. A woman’s voice said, ‘Hello, I’m calling from the Hôtel Palym…There is someone here who would like to speak to you, sir…’ The Hôtel Palym was almost opposite her place, in the little street from which you could see the Gare de Lyon clock. We’d taken a room there once under the names Yvette Dintillac and Patrick de Tourane. ‘Are you still on the line, sir?’ The woman said. ‘I’m putting you through…’ I was sure it would be her. Once again, we would be meeting between piano lessons and the students would play Hummel’s Bolero until the end of time. As Dr Bouvière liked to say, life is an eternal return. There was static on the line and it sounded like the murmur of wind through leaves. I waited, gripping the handset to avoid making the slightest movement that might break the thread stretching back through the years. ‘Putting you through, sir…’ I thought I heard the sound of furniture being knocked over or someone falling down the stairs.

‘Hello…Hello…Can you hear me?’ A man’s voice. I was disappointed. Still the interference on the line. ‘I was a friend of your father’s…Can you hear me?’ I kept saying yes, but he was the one who couldn’t hear me. ‘Guy Roussotte… My name is Guy Roussotte…Perhaps your father mentioned me…Your father and I worked together at the Bureau Otto… Can you hear me?’ He seemed to be asking the question for form’s sake without really caring if I could hear him or not. ‘Guy Roussotte…Your father and I had an office together…’ It was as if he was calling from one of those bars on the Champs-Élysées fifty years ago when the clamour of conversation revolved around black-market dealings, women and horses. His voice was becoming increasingly muffled and only fragments of sentences reached me: ‘Your father… Bureau Otto…meet…a few days at the Hôtel Palym… where I could reach him…Just tell him: Guy Roussotte… the Bureau Otto…from Guy Roussotte…a phone call… Can you hear me?…’

How did he get my phone number? I wasn’t in the phone book. I imagined this ghost calling from a room at the Hôtel Palym, perhaps the same room that Yvette Dintillac and Patrick de Tourane stayed in one night long ago. What a strange coincidence…The voice was now too faint, and the sentences too disjointed. I wondered if it was my father he wanted to see, believing him still of this world, or if it was me. Soon after, I could no longer hear his voice. Again, the sound of a piece of furniture being knocked over or someone falling down the stairs. Then the dial tone, as if the phone had been hung up. It was already eight o’clock at night and I didn’t have the energy to call the Hôtel Palym back. I was really disappointed. I had hoped to hear Hélène Navachine’s voice. What could have become of her, after all this time? The last time I saw her in a dream, it was interrupted before she had time to give me her address and phone number.

*

The same winter that I heard the faraway voice of Guy Roussotte, I had an unfortunate experience. Strive as you might for over thirty years to make your life clearer and more harmonious than it was earlier on, there’s always the risk that an incident will suddenly drag you backwards. It was in December. For about a week, whenever I went out or returned home, I noticed a woman standing motionless a few metres from the door of my apartment building or on the pavement opposite. She was never there before six o’clock in the evening. A tall woman, dressed in a sheepskin coat, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and carrying a brown shoulder bag. She kept watching me as she stood there in silence. She looked menacing. From which forgotten childhood nightmare could this woman have emerged? And why now? I leaned out the window. She was waiting on the pavement, as though she was standing guard over the front of the building. But I hadn’t switched on the light in my room so she couldn’t possibly have seen me. With the big shoulder bag, hat and boots, she looked as though she had once been the canteen cook for an army that had disappeared long ago, but had left many corpses behind. I was afraid that from then on, and until the end of my life, she would be standing guard wherever I lived and that it would be pointless moving house. She would find my new address every time.

One night, I came home later than usual and she was still there, motionless. I was about to push open the door of the building when she walked slowly towards me. An old woman. She stared at me harshly as if to make me ashamed of something or remind me of an error I might have made. I held her gaze in silence. I ended up wondering what I might be guilty of. I crossed my arms and said in a calm voice, articulating each syllable, that I would like to know what she wanted from me.

She raised her chin and from her mouth came a torrent of insults. She called me by my first name and addressed me with the familiar tu . Were we somehow related? Perhaps I had known her long ago. The wide-brimmed hat accentuated the hardness of her face and, in the yellow light of the streetlamp, she looked like a very old German poseur by the name of Leni Riefenstahl. Life and emotions had left no trace on this mummy’s face, yes, the mummy of a nasty capricious little girl from eighty years ago. She kept staring at me with her raptor eyes and I didn’t look away. I gave her a big smile. It felt like she was about to bite and infect me with her venom, but beneath this aggression there was something false, like the lifeless performance of a bad actress. Again, she heaped insults on me. She was leaning against the door of the building to block my way. I kept smiling at her and realised that it was making her increasingly exasperated. But I wasn’t scared of her. Gone were the childhood terrors, in the dark, of a witch or death opening the bedroom door. ‘Could you lower your voice a little, madame?’ I said, in a courteous tone that surprised even me. She, too, seemed taken aback by the calmness of my voice. ‘Excuse me, but I’m no longer used to voices as loud as yours.’ I saw her features contract and her eyes dilate in a split second. She stuck out her chin defiantly — a very heavy, prominent chin.

I smiled at her. Then she threw herself on me. With one hand she gripped my shoulder and with the other she tried to scratch my face. I tried to free myself, but she was really heavy. I felt my childhood terrors gradually return. For over thirty years, I had made sure that my life was as well ordered as a formal French garden. With its wide walkways, lawns and hedges, the garden had covered over a swamp where I had almost gone under long ago. Thirty years of striving. All of it just for this Medusa figure to stand in wait for me one night on the street and pounce on me…This old woman was going to suffocate me. She was as heavy as my childhood memories. I was being smothered in a shroud and it was useless to fight. No one could help me. A little further down, on the square, there was a police station, with some officers on guard duty out the front. It would all end up in a paddy wagon and a police station. It had been inevitable for a long time. Besides, at the age of seventeen, when my father had me arrested because he wanted to get rid of me, it happened around here, near the church. More than thirty years of futile striving just to come right back to where it started, in neighbourhood police stations. How sad…They looked like two drunks fighting in the street, one of the policemen would say. They would sit us on a bench, the old woman and me, like everyone who’d been caught in night round-ups, and I would have to state my name and address. They would ask me if I knew her. ‘She’s trying to pass herself off as your mother,’ the superintendent would say, ‘but according to her papers, you’re not related. And besides, your mother’s identity is unknown. You’re free to go, sir.’ It was the same superintendent my father had handed me over to when I was seventeen. Dr Bouvière was right: life is an eternal return.