Patrick Modiano - So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood

He wondered whether he had not gone too far. But why, after all? Did he not appear to be a sensible young man who wanted to write a pamphlet about Saint-Leu-la-Forêt?

“The house that’s slightly to the right. . with the large porch. .”

“You mean La Maladrerie?”

Daragane had forgotten this name, which caused him a pang of emotion. He had the fleeting sense of passing beneath the porch of the house.

“Yes, that’s it. . La Maladrerie. .” and pronouncing these five syllables he suddenly experienced a feeling of dizziness, or rather of fear, as though La Maladrerie were associated for him with a bad dream.

“Who spoke to you about La Maladrerie?”

He was taken aback. It would have been better to tell Dr Voustraat the truth. Now, it was too late. He should have done so earlier, on the doorstep. “You looked after me, a very long time ago, during my childhood.” But no, he would have felt like an imposter and as though he were stealing someone else’s identity. That child seemed like a stranger to him now.

“It was the owner of the Ermitage restaurant who spoke to me about it. .”

He said this just in case, to put him off the track. Did this establishment still exist, and had it ever really existed apart from in his memories?

“Ah, yes. . the Ermitage restaurant. I didn’t think it was called that anymore, nowadays. . Have you known Saint-Leu for a long time?”

Daragane sensed a surge of dizziness welling up inside him, the kind that affects you when you are on the brink of confessing to something that will alter the course of your life. There, at the top of the slope, you just have to let yourself glide, as though on a slide. At the bottom of the large garden at La Maladrerie, there had actually been a slide, probably erected by the previous owners, and its handrail was rusty.

“No. It’s the first time I’ve been to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt.” Outside, dusk was falling, and Dr Voustraat stood up to switch on a lamp and stoke the fire.

“Wintry weather. . Did you see that fog just now?. . I was right to make a fire. .”

He sat down in the armchair and leant over towards Daragane.

“You were lucky to have rung my bell today. . It’s my day off. . I should also mention that I’ve cut down on the number of my home visits. .”

Was this word “visits” a hint on his part that implied he had recognised him? But there had been so many home visits over the last fifteen years and so many appointments at Dr Louis Voustraat’s home, in the little room that served as his surgery, at the end of the corridor, that he could not recognise all the faces. And in any case, thought Daragane, how could one ascertain a likeness between that child and the person he was today?

“La Maladrerie was indeed lived in by some strange people. . But do you think there’s really any point in my talking to you about them?”

Daragane had the sense that there was something more behind these harmless words. As on the radio, for example, when the sound is blurred and two voices are broadcast one over the other. He seemed to be hearing: “Why have you come back to Saint-Leu after fifteen years?”

“It’s as though this house had a curse put on it. . Perhaps because of its name. .”

“Its name?”

Dr Voustraat smiled at him.

“Do you know what ‘maladrerie’ means?”

“Of course,” said Daragane.

He did not know, but he was ashamed to admit this to Dr Voustraat.

“Before the war, it was lived in by a doctor like me who left Saint-Leu. . Later on, at the time I arrived, a certain Lucien Führer used to come here regularly. . the owner of a sleazy Paris dive. . There were many comings and goings. . It was from this time on that the house was visited by some strange people. . up until the end of the fifties. .”

Daragane jotted down the doctor’s words in his notebook as he went along. It was as though he were about to reveal the secret of his origins to him, all those years from the beginning of one’s life that had been forgotten, apart from the occasional detail that rises up from the depths, a street entirely covered by a canopy of leaves, a smell, a name that is familiar but which you no longer know whom it belonged to, a slide.

“And then this Lucien Führer disappeared from one day to the next, and the house was bought by a Monsieur Vincent. . Roger Vincent, if I remember correctly. . He always parked his American convertible in the street. .”

After fifteen years, Daragane was not entirely sure what colour this car was. Beige? Yes, surely. With red leather seats. Dr Voustraat remembered that it was a convertible and, if he had a good memory, he might have been able to confirm this colour: beige. But he feared that if he asked him this question, he might arouse his suspicion.

“I could not tell you exactly what this Monsieur Roger Vincent’s job was. . perhaps the same as Lucien Führer’s. . A man of about forty who came from Paris frequently. .”

It seemed to Daragane in those days that Roger Vincent never slept at the house. He would spend the day at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt and leave again after dinner. From his bed, he could hear him starting up his car, and the noise was different from Annie’s car. A noise both louder and more muffled.

“People said that he was half American or that he’d spent a long time in America. . He had the look of an American. . Tall. . sporty in his appearance. . I treated him once. . I believe he had dislocated his wrist. .”

Daragane had no memory of that. He would have been impressed if he had seen Roger Vincent wearing a bandage on his wrist or a plaster.

“There was also a young woman and a little boy who lived there. . She wasn’t old enough to have been his mother. . I used to think that she was his big sister. . She could have been this Monsieur Roger Vincent’s daughter. .”

Roger Vincent’s daughter? No, this notion had not occurred to him. He had never asked himself questions as to the precise relationship between Roger Vincent and Annie. It would appear, he often used to say to himself, that children never ask themselves any questions. Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don’t even know.

“There were many comings and goings in this house. . Sometimes, people would arrive in the middle of the night. .”

In those days, Daragane slept well — the sleep of childhood — except on the evenings when he waited for Annie to return. He would often hear noisy voices and doors banging in the night, but he fell asleep again immediately. And anyway, the house was enormous, a building made up of several different parts, and so he never knew who was there. Leaving to go to school in the morning, he used to notice a number of cars parked in front of the porch. In the part of the building where his bedroom was, there was also Annie’s, on the other side of the corridor.

“And, in your opinion, who were all these people?” he asked Dr Voustraat.

“A house search was conducted, but they had all disappeared. . They questioned me, since I was their nearest neighbour. . Apparently, this Roger Vincent had been implicated in an affair they called ‘The Combination’. . I must have read this name somewhere, but I couldn’t tell you what it’s to do with. . I confess I’ve never been interested in news items.”

Did Daragane really want to know any more than Dr Voustraat did? A gleam of light that you can barely make out from beneath a closed door and which indicates someone is there. But he did not want to open the door in order to discover who was in the room, or rather in the cupboard. A turn of phrase immediately came to mind: “the skeleton in the cupboard”. No, he did not want to know what the word “combination” stood for. Ever since childhood, he used to have the same bad dream: huge relief initially, when he woke up, as though he had escaped from a danger. And then, the bad dream became more and more specific. He had been an accomplice or a witness to something serious that had happened very long ago in the past. Certain people had been arrested. He himself had never been identified. He lived under the threat of being interrogated, when they would notice that he had had connections with the “culprits”. And it would be impossible for him to answer questions.