Patrick Modiano - The Occupation Trilogy - La Place de l'Étoile – The Night Watch – Ring Roads

After a week, you abandoned your cherished ghosts and left with the takings. You crossed the Red Sea, reached Palestine and died of exhaustion. And there you were, you had made it all the way from Paris to Jerusalem.

Between them, my two girlfriends earned three thousand schillings a night. Prostitution and pandering suddenly seemed to me to be ill-paid professions unless practised on the scale of a Lucky Luciano. Unfortunately, I was not cast from the same mould as that captain of industry.

Yasmine introduced me to a number of dubious individuals: Jean-Farouk de Mérode, Paulo Hayakawa, the ageing Baroness Lydia Stahl, Sophie Knout, Rachid von Rosenheim, M. Igor, T.W.A. Levy, Otto da Silva and others whose names I’ve forgotten. With these shady characters, I trafficked gold, laundered counterfeit zlotys and sold wild grasses like hashish and marijuana to anyone who wished to graze on them. Eventually I enlisted in the French Gestapo. Badge number S. 1113. Working from the Rue Lauriston.

I had been bitterly disappointed by the Milice . There, the only people I had met were boy scouts just like the brave lads in the Résistance. Darnand was an out-and-out idealist.

I felt more comfortable around Pierre Bonny, Henri Chamberlin-Lafont and their acolytes. What’s more, on the Rue Lauriston I met up with my old ethics teacher, Joseph Joanovici.

To the killers in the Gestapo, Joano and I were the two in-house Jews. The third was in Hamburg. His name was Maurice Sachs.

One tires of everything. In the end I left my two girlfriends and the merry little band of crooks who jeopardized my health. I followed an avenue as far as the Danube. It was dark, snow was falling benignly. Would I throw myself into the river or not? Franz-Josefs-Kai was deserted, from somewhere I could hear snatches of a song, ‘Weisse Weihnacht’, ah yes, people were celebrating Christmas. Miss Evelyn used to read me Dickens and Andersen. What joy the next morning to find thousands of toys at the foot of the tree. All this happened in the house on the Quai Conti, on the banks of the Seine. An exceptional childhood, a magical childhood I no longer have time to tell you about. An elegant swan dive into the Danube on Christmas Eve? I was sorry I had not left a farewell note for Hilda and Yasmine. For example: ‘I will not be home tonight, for the night will be black and white.’ No matter. I consoled myself with the thought that these two whores had probably never read Gérard de Nerval. Thankfully, in Paris, no one would fail to see the link between Nerval and Schlemilovitch, the two winter suicides. I was incorrigible. I was prepared to appropriate another man’s death just as I had appropriated the pens of Proust and Céline, the paintbrushes of Modigliani and Soutine, the gurning faces of Groucho Marx and Chaplin. My tuberculosis? Had I not stolen it from Franz Kafka? I could still change my mind and die like him in the Kierling sanatorium not far from here. Nerval or Kafka? Suicide or sanatorium? No, suicide did not suit me, a Jew has no right to commit suicide. Such luxury should be left to Werther. What then? Turn up at Kierling sanatorium? Could I be sure that I would die there, like Kafka?

I did not hear him approach. He brusquely shoves a badge into my face on which I read POLIZEI. He asks for my papers. I’ve forgotten them. He takes me by the arm. I ask him why he does not use his handcuffs. He gives a reassuring little laugh.

‘Now, now, sir, you’ve had too much to drink. The Christmas spirit, probably. Come on now, I’ll take you home. Where do you live?’

I obstinately refuse to give him my address.

‘Well, in that case I have no choice but to take you to the station.’

The apparent kindness of the policeman is getting on my nerves. I’ve already worked out that he belongs to the Gestapo. Why not just tell me straight out? Maybe he thinks I will put up a fight, scream like a stuck pig? Not at all. Kierling sanatorium is no match for the clinic where this good man plans to take me. First, there will be the customary formalities: I will be asked for my surname, my first name, my date of birth. They will ensure I am genuinely ill, force me to take some sinister test. Next, the operating theatre. Lying on the table, I will wait impatiently for my surgeons Torquemada and Ximénes. They will hand me an x-ray of my lungs which I will see are nothing but a mass of hideous tumours like the tentacles of an octopus.

‘Do you wish us to operate or not?’ Dr Torquemada will ask me calmly.

‘All we need do is transplant two stainless steel lungs,’ Dr Ximénes will gently explain.

‘We have a superior professional conscientiousness,’ Dr Torquemada will say.

‘Together with an acute interest in your health,’ said Dr Ximénes.

‘Unfortunately, most of our patients love their illness with a fierce passion and consequently see us not as surgeons. .’

‘. . but as torturers.’

‘Patients are often unjust towards their doctors,’ Dr Ximénes will add.

‘We are forced to treat them against their will,’ Dr Torquemada will say.

‘A thankless task,’ Dr Ximénes will add.

‘Do you know that some patients in our clinic have formed a union?’ Dr Torquemada will ask me. ‘They have decided to strike, to refuse to allow us to treat them. .’

‘A serious threat to the medical profession,’ Dr Ximénes will add. ‘Especially since the unionist fever is infecting all sectors of the clinic. .’

‘We have tasked a very scrupulous practitioner, Dr Himmler, to crush this rebellion. He is systematically performing euthanasia on all the union members.’

‘So what do you decide. .’ Dr Torquemada will ask me, ‘the operation or euthanasia?’

‘There are no other possible alternatives.’

Events did not unfold as I had expected. The policeman was still holding my arm, telling me he was walking me to the nearest police station for a simple identity check. When I stepped into his office, the Kommisar, a cultured SS officer intimately familiar with the French poets, asked:

‘Say, what have you done, you who come here, with your youth?’

I explained to him how I had wasted it. And then I talked to him about my impatience: at an age when others were planning their future, I could think only of ending things. Take the gare de Lyon, for example, under the German occupation. I was supposed to catch a train that would carry me far away from misfortune and fear. Travellers were queuing at the ticket desks. I had only to wait half an hour to get my ticket. But no, I got into a first class carriage without a ticket like an imposter. At Chalon-sur-Saône, when the German ticket inspectors checked the compartment, they caught me. I held out my hands. I told them that despite the false papers in the name Jean Cassis de Coudray Macouard, I was a jew. The relief!

‘Then they brought me to you, Herr Kommissar. You decide my fate. I promise I will be utterly docile.’

The Komissar smiles gently, pats my cheek and asks whether I really have tuberculosis.

‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ he says. ‘At your age, everyone is consumptive. It needs to be treated, otherwise you end up spitting blood and dragging yourself along all your life. This is what I’ve decided: if you’d been born earlier, I would have sent you to Auschwitz to have your tuberculosis treated, but we live in more civilised times. Here, this is a ticket for Israel. Apparently, over there, the Jews. .’

The sea was inky blue and Tel Aviv was white, so white. As the boat came alongside, the steady beat of his heart made him feel he had returned to his ancestral land after two thousand years away. He had embarked at Marseille, with the Israeli national shipping line. All through the crossing, he tried to calm his rising panic by anaesthetising himself with alcohol and morphine. Now, with Tel Aviv spread out before him, he could die, his heart at peace.