Family Record

by Patrick Modiano

  I walked down to the platform of the Flon station. A subway station with no smell or sound, trains in sprightly colors like children’s toys; we waited quietly for their doors to open. The cars glided in padded silence. Forehead pressed against the window, I stared at the neon advertisements. They looked very sharp—much sharper than in France—and shone in bright hues. Only they, and the lit station signs of Montriond and Jordils, could pierce my lethargy. I was happy. I had no more memory. My amnesia would thicken with each passing day, like a callus. No more past. No more future. Time would halt and everything would blend into the blue mist of Lake Geneva. I had reached the state I called “Switzerland of the heart.”

  It was a topic of friendly disagreement between me and Michel Muzzli, a Swiss boy my age whom I’d met at the beginning of my stay and who worked for an insurance company. He reproached me for having a false idea of his country, the sort of idea common among rich cosmopolitans who spend their sunset years around Montreux—or among political exiles. No, Switzerland was not the no-man’s-land, the limbo that I wanted to see it as. Each time I spoke the words “Swiss neutrality,” they provoked an obvious pain in Muzzli. He doubled over as if he’d been shot in the gut, and his face turned purple. In a staccato voice, he explained that “neutrality” did not correspond, in any deep sense, to what he called the “Swiss soul.” Politicians, notables, and industrialists had done everything in their power to drag Switzerland onto the path of “neutrality,” but from there to thinking that “they” expressed the country’s aspirations . . . No, “they” had—according to Muzzli—diverted it from its true vocation, which was to assume and atone for all the world’s sufferings and injustices. The Switzerland Muzzli dreamed about, which would soon be “revealed,” took on in his mind the appearance of a pure, radiant young woman starting out on an adventure. She was constantly affronted, her white dress spattered, but through all the insults and mudslinging she persevered, smiling and merciful, and perhaps taking a certain sensual delight in her Stations of the Cross. This masochistic vision of Switzerland worried me somewhat, but Michel, when not speaking about his country, was the gentlest of souls. A rather tall blond, with prominent cheekbones, transparent blue eyes, and wispy mustache, who looked more Russian than Swiss.

  He introduced me to another boy named Badrawi, whom we nicknamed Papou, and soon the three of us became inseparable. Badrawi held some mysterious job in a bank on Rue Centrale. He was of Egyptian origin and his family had left Alexandria after the downfall of King Farouk. His only remaining relative was an old aunt who lived in Geneva, to whom he sent half his salary. Very short and slight, with black eyes and hair, he had a child’s laugh, but his gaze often bespoke a vague terror. He and Muzzli lived in the same modern building, on Chemin de Chandolin, near the Federal Courthouse. Papou Badrawi’s room was crammed full of English books. On the nightstand was a photo of his fiancée, also English, a girl with a feline face who wrote him long letters to say that she loved him but was cheating on him, but it didn’t matter because she loved him. This was not Papou’s viewpoint. He talked to me about it a few times, as we drank tea. He consumed a lot of tea, and when you knocked at his door, you could expect to be greeted with a steaming cup of Earl Grey.

  We all weathered difficult moments. Once or twice a month, Muzzli made what we called a “ruckus.” On those nights, the telephone in Papou’s room would ring and someone would ask him to come pick up his friend, for Muzzli always carried Badrawi’s number on him. The first few times, Muzzli had chosen as the site of his “ruckuses” a nightclub on Avenue Benjamin-Constant where he knew one of the emcees, a blonde who was the spitting image of the actress Martine Carol, and who in fact was named Micheline Carole. Then there was the restaurant in the Hôtel de la Paix. And the main hall of the train station. And the Municipal Theater, one evening when a troupe from Zurich was performing Schiller’s William Tell. Before long people began recognizing him, and he was barred from entering public places.

  One evening, at Badrawi’s, we had been waiting for Michel for two or three hours when the phone rang: the manager of an “inn” warned us that “Monsieur Muzzli” was already in a “very bad way” and was about to get himself “lynched.” He didn’t want any “trouble with the police.” Up to us to “get Monsieur Muzzli out of this mess.” The inn was located about five miles away, in a village called Chalet à Gobet. We took a cab and wandered for some time before finding the establishment, in the middle of a small pine forest. Muzzli was lying on a table in the back of the room, face badly bruised and his shirt open. His left foot was missing its shoe. A group of about a dozen persons, who looked rural, gave us hostile glares. Muzzli let himself slide off the table and stumbled toward us. He had a split lip. Badrawi and I held him up by the arms and, as we were crossing the doorway into the fresh air, we heard someone at our backs shout in a very strong Vaud accent:

  “Good thing they came to get ’im. Otherwise we’d a finished off the piece of crap . . .”

  As usual, Muzzli had harangued them about Switzerland. I knew all his arguments by heart. He’d told them that Switzerland had been “asleep” since the turn of the century and that it was time for it to wake up and finally “get its hands dirty.” Otherwise, the Swiss would look more and more like a bunch of “clean little pink piglets.” That evening, they nearly had lynched him, but that was what he wanted: for someone to lynch him, Michel Muzzli, Swiss citizen, and ideally for it to happen in a slum amid heaps of trash. And so he would atone for his country’s excessive cleanliness and other crimes.

  While Michel aspired to be a martyr, Badrawi, on the contrary, lived in terror of being murdered. He confided this secret to me early in our friendship. He couldn’t put out of his mind that his cousin, a certain Alec Scouffi, had been killed in Paris in 1932, in circumstances that remained murky. Scouffi was born in Alexandria and had published two novels in French and a biography of the singer Caruso. His photo had pride of place on my friend’s nightstand, and the resemblance was so striking that for a long time I thought it was a photo of Badrawi himself. Sometimes I wondered whether he hadn’t invented this cousin because he liked the idea of being murdered. Whatever the case, Papou was convinced that the same people who had killed his cousin would kill him as well, and no amount of reasoning or friendly persuasion could talk him out of it. He would admit only that he ran less risk in Switzerland than anywhere else. He was certain that Swiss neutrality would protect him like a veil and that no one would dare commit a murder in this country. Muzzli tried to convince him otherwise, and reproached him for hanging the portrait of General Henri Guisan on his wall. But Badrawi replied that the gentle, paternal face of that Swiss soldier, who had never fought and never killed anyone, was a great comfort to him and calmed his nerves.

  And so, when night fell, we each returned to our solitude: Michel Muzzli to his regret at being Swiss, and Papou, his fear of assassination that made him bolt the door to his room and huddle on his bed with a cup of tea. As for me, I listened to the radio. By turning the dial a millimeter at a time—if the needle made too sudden a jump, I had to start over—I managed to pick up the station Genève-Variétés on the medium waves. At precisely 10 p.m., the program Music in the Night came on. Ever since I had discovered this nightly broadcast, which lasted only twenty minutes, I couldn’t stop listening to it, alone in my room on Avenue d’Ouchy. A theme song picked out on the piano, its melody filled with tropical grace. A voice coming in over the theme, announcing in deep, slightly nasal tones:

  “Music in the Night.”

  Then another voice, more metallic:

  “With your hosts . . .”

  The first voice, deep as ever:

  “Robert Gerbauld . . .”

  The second voice, higher-pitched, almost feminine:

  “. . . and Jean-Xavier Curtine.”

  You heard the theme song for a few seconds more. After the final chord, the first voice, Gerbauld’s, specified in a tone of furtive complicity:

  �
�That was, as always, a piece by Heitor Villa-Lobos.”

  During the twenty minutes the program lasted, they announced sonatas, adagios, capriccios, and fantasias. They had a marked taste for composers of Spanish inspiration, and it was with a gourmand’s inflections that Gerbauld pronounced the names Albéniz, Manuel de Falla, Granados . . . Neither of them added any commentary; they merely gave the title of the piece, which lent their show a dry elegance. At the end, quiet piano notes: the second theme. A final chord, barely perceptible. Then Gerbauld’s voice:

  “That was, as always, Sonata No. 6 in D Major by Hummel.”

  And the voice of Jean-Xavier Curtine, staccato but tender:

  “Thank you, dear listeners, this has been Music in the Night. Good evening, and until tomorrow.”

  What happened to me after a few days, as I listened to that program? I don’t know if my hearing had become more acute, but I thought I made out a slight crackling sound under the flow of music. At first I thought it was the static you get when you pick up a foreign channel, but I soon became convinced it was the murmur of several overlapping conversations, a confused murmur from which a voice occasionally emerged, sending out a call for help or a muddled dispatch, as if people were taking advantage of the program to exchange messages or grope their way toward each other. As if their voices were vainly trying to pierce the screen of the music. On other evenings, this didn’t occur and the pieces that Gerbauld or Curtine announced played from start to finish with crystalline clarity.

  One Sunday, it took me longer than usual to pick up Genève-Variétés. Music in the Night had already been on for ten minutes, and to my surprise, I heard Gerbauld say:

  “Dear listeners”—and his voice had an uncharacteristic tremor—“the piece we’ve just heard has touched me deeply. This music is like a wail from beyond the grave, a long cry of exile . . .”

  A pause. Gerbauld resumed, his voice still more shaken:

  “The composer surely wished to express his feeling of being the last survivor of a vanished world, a ghost among ghosts.”

  Another silence. Then Curtine’s voice, husky:

  “That feeling is one you know all too well, Robert Gerbauld.”

  And Gerbauld’s voice, abrupt, as if afraid the other would say too much: “Dear listeners, good evening. Until tomorrow.”

  One thought nailed me to the spot, provoked by the words I had just heard: beyond the grave, exile, ghost among ghosts. Robert Gerbauld reminded me of someone. I stretched out on the bed and stared at the wall in front of me. A face appeared amid the flowers of the wallpaper. A man’s face. The face that emerged from the wall, plain to see, belonged to D., the most heinous figure in Occupied Paris; D., whom I knew to have hidden out in Madrid, then Switzerland, and who was living under an assumed name in Geneva, having found work on the radio. But of course: Robert Gerbauld—it was he. Once more, the past engulfed me. One night in March 1942, a man of barely thirty, tall, looking like he might be South American, happened to be in the Saint-Moritz, a restaurant on Rue Marignan, almost at the corner of Avenue des Champs-Elysées. This was my father. A young woman was with him, named Hella Hartwich. Ten-thirty in the evening. A group of French police in plain clothes entered the restaurant and blocked all the exits. Then they began checking the diners’ identities. My father and his girlfriend had no papers. The French police shoved them into the Black Maria with a dozen others for a more extensive check on Rue Greffulhe, at the headquarters of the Jewish Affairs Police.

  When the Black Maria turned into Rue Greffulhe, my father noticed that people were coming out of the Mathurins theater, where they were playing Mademoiselle from Panama. The inspectors dragged them into what had been a living room. It still had the chandelier and the mirror above the mantelpiece. In the middle of the room was a large, light-colored wooden desk, behind which was a man in an overcoat, whose fleshy, clean-shaven face my father remembered. That was D.

  He asked my father and his girlfriend for their names. Out of lassitude or defiance, they gave them. D. absently leafed through several sheets of paper, on which were no doubt listed all the names that sounded suspicious. He raised his head and signaled to one of his men.

  “Take them to the holding tank.”

  In the stairway, my father, his girlfriend, and three or four other suspects were bookended by two inspectors. The hallway light went out. Before anyone could turn it back on, my father, pulling his girlfriend with him, hurtled down the flight of stairs between him and the ground floor and they fled through the street entrance. They ran toward Rue des Mathurins. They thought they heard shouts and the sound of footsteps behind them. Then the engine of the Black Maria. They skirted Square Louis-XVI, pushed open the door to a building, and flew up the staircase in the dark. They reached the top floor without attracting attention. There, they waited for morning. They had no idea what they’d just avoided. After the holding tank came the camps at Drancy or Compiègne. And after that, the deportation convoys. A flat, ridgeless face. A mouth with a rimmed, drooping upper lip and a minuscule lower lip, and that mouth was the same as on certain frogs that glue their faces to the glass of aquariums. Skin that was olive, smooth, and lacking in any body hair. That was how D. appeared to me that night, he who moved in and out of black market restaurants under the Occupation, surrounded by a gang of ephebes, part killers, part boy scouts, whom oddly enough they used to call the Gray Gloves. D., the man on Rue Greffulhe. He followed me even to this land where I’d thought I would gradually discard my memory. His head glided along the wall, floating closer, and already I could feel his clammy, flaccid touch.

  And yet, how beautiful life was that spring . . . In the hours of freedom that our jobs left us, we arranged to meet up, Papou, Muzzli, and I, by the side of a small swimming pool at a hotel on the corner of Avenue d’Ouchy and Avenue de Cour. It was built at the back of a garden and sheltered from Avenue d’Ouchy by a curtain of trees. Micheline Carole would come join us when she got up, at around one. She sunbathed all afternoon long, as her job didn’t start until evening. Two twin sisters were also part of our gang, two tiny, gorgeous Indonesians, who claimed to be “studying” in Lausanne.

  On the pale green water floated children’s life preservers bearing the inscription “Happy Days,” followed by the number of that year. 1965? 1966? 1967? What difference does it make? I was twenty.

  Then some very strange coincidences occurred. One Saturday morning, I went to the pool earlier than usual. A swimmer who had arrived before me was doing the butterfly stroke. When he saw me, he rushed over and we hugged: it was a friend from Paris, a young Belgian singer named Henri Seroka. He was living in that hotel. He had competed, he told me, in a singing contest in Evian, and since the Evian hotels were full, the contest organizers had found him a room in Lausanne. The elimination rounds had lasted five days, and every morning he took the boat that shuttled between Lausanne and Evian. The jury had selected him for the semifinals, then eliminated him in the last round, despite “popular demand.” His defeat didn’t seem to bother him. He had been there for a week and couldn’t bring himself to leave the hotel. Even he was surprised by the indolence and torpor slowly taking hold of him. He didn’t even care about his bill, which grew larger with each passing day and which he couldn’t afford to pay. We were happy to see each other. Henri Seroka brought me back to a past that was still recent, to afternoons when my friend Hughes de Courson and I would hang around the shabby offices of Fantasia Music on Rue de Grammont. We wrote songs and Seroka had recorded one of them, “Les oiseaux reviennent,” which earned him an honorable mention at the Sopot Festival and a medal at the Grand Competition of Song in Barcelona. Since then, Fantasia Music had foundered and many people we knew had gone down with it, but it was sweet to run into each other by this pool.

  We had a few days’ vacation for Pentecost, and it felt as if we all forgot our cares. Michel Muzzli was relaxed, and there wasn’t a single “ruckus.” I was hoping he’d finally made his peace with his homeland. Badrawi
regained an Eastern insouciance under the warm sun and fretted less about assassination. And besides, his English fiancée had written, asking to visit him in Lausanne the following month. As for Henri Seroka, he spoke without bitterness of the Evian competition. He’d been narrowly edged out by a thirteen-year-old prodigy who had appeared onstage in short pants, white shirt, and tie to sing some rock ’n’ roll numbers. Even Seroka couldn’t help laughing. He really didn’t know what demon had pushed him to compete in that stupid contest. He couldn’t resist. Whenever he heard about a singing competition, he entered it, and so had taken some lovely trips, not only to Sopot, Poland, but also to Italy, Austria, and the USSR. They were getting to know him on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He had sung in Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev, and there, he said, he had met his true audience. I didn’t doubt it. More than anyone, the Russians must have appreciated his classic crooner’s voice as well as his classic physique: he was the spitting image of Errol Flynn. Moreover, Micheline Carole seemed increasingly susceptible to his charm. It was mutual. In the middle of the pool, they indulged in a kind of aquatic flirtation. The couple they formed—he, the double of Errol Flynn; she, of Martine Carol—gave me the illusion that time had flowed back to the source. Those two deceased actors were here with us again, as in the halcyon days of our childhood, and were even kind enough to swim and flirt before my half-closed eyes.

  One of the tiny Indonesians took a shine to me, while her twin sister found Muzzli appealing. Papou Badrawi, nestled deep in his deck chair, dreamed about the arrival of his fiancée. We all floated in a sensual mist, heightened by the sun’s reflections on the green water, the quivering of the trees along Avenue d’Ouchy, and the Pimp’s champagne that Seroka ordered for us. Our get-togethers lasted until very late, and I no longer had a chance to tune in to Music in the Night.