So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood

by Patrick Modiano

  “I don’t think you’re going to use all that for your pamphlet about Saint-Leu . . . or else you would have to search for more precise details in the police archives . . . But, in all honesty, do you think that would be worthwhile?”

  This question surprised Daragane. Had Dr Voustraat recognised him and seen through him? “In all honesty, do you think that would be worthwhile?” He had said this with kindness, in a tone of fatherly reproach or even friendly advice—the advice of someone who might have known you in your childhood.

  “No, of course,” said Daragane. “It would be out of place in a simple pamphlet about Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. One could conceivably write a novel about it.”

  He had set foot on a slippery slope which he was on the point of sliding down: admitting to Doctor Voustraat the precise reasons why he had rung his doorbell. He could even say to him: “Doctor, let’s go to your surgery for a consultation, as we used to do in the old days . . . Is it still at the end of the corridor?”

  “A novel? You would have to know all the principal characters. Many people have been to this house . . . Those who questioned me used to refer to a list and mentioned every name to me . . . But I didn’t know any of those individuals . . .” Daragane would have really liked to have this list in his possession. It would probably have helped him pick up Annie’s trail, but all these people had vanished into thin air, changing their surnames, their first names and their features. Annie herself, if she were still alive, would be unlikely still to be known as Annie.

  “And the child?” asked Daragane. “Did you hear any news of the child?”

  “None. I’ve often wondered what became of him . . . What a strange start to life . . .”

  “They must surely have registered him at a school . . .”

  “Yes. At the Forêt school on rue de Beuvron. I remember having written a note to explain his absence because of flu.”

  “Perhaps at the Forêt school, we might find some record of his being there . . .”

  “No, unfortunately. They pulled down the Forêt school two years ago. It was a very small school, you know . . .”

  Daragane remembered the playground, its asphalt surface, its plane trees, and the contrast, on sunny afternoons, between the green of the foliage and the black of the asphalt. And he did not need to close his eyes to do so.

  “The school no longer exists, but I can show you around the house . . .”

  Once again, he had the feeling that Dr Voustraat had seen through him. But no, that was impossible. There was no longer anything in common between himself and this child he had left behind along with the others, with Annie, Roger Vincent and the people who came at night, by car, and whose names once featured on a list—that of passengers on a sunken ship.

  “I was entrusted with a duplicate key to the house . . . in case any of my patients wanted to visit it . . . It’s for sale . . . But not many customers have turned up. Shall I take you round?”

  “Another time.”

  Dr Voustraat seemed disappointed. In actual fact, thought Daragane, he was glad to invite me in and to chat. Normally, during these endless afternoons with time to spare, he must be on his own.

  “Really? Wouldn’t you like to? It’s one of the oldest houses in Saint-Leu . . . As its name indicates, it was built on the site of a former lazaretto . . . That could be of interest for your pamphlet . . .”

  “Another day,” said Daragane. “I promise you I’ll be back.”

  He lacked the courage to go into the house. He preferred that it should remain for him one of those places that have been familiar to you and which you occasionally happen to visit in dreams: in appearance they are the same, and yet they are permeated with something strange. A veil or a light that is too harsh? And in these dreams you come across people you once loved and whom you know are dead. If you speak to them they don’t hear your voice.

  “Is the furniture still the same as fifteen years ago?”

  “There is no longer any furniture,” said Dr Voustraat. “All the rooms are empty. And the garden is an absolute virgin forest.”

  Annie’s bedroom, on the other side of the corridor, from where in his semi-slumber he used to hear voices and shrieks of laughter very late into the night. She was accompanied by Colette Laurent. But, often, the voice and the laugh were those of a man whom he had never met in the house during the daytime. This man must have left very early in the morning, long before school. Someone who would remain a stranger until the end of time. Another more detailed memory came back to him, but effortlessly so, like the words of songs learnt in your childhood and that you are able to recite all your life without understanding them. Her two bedroom windows gave onto the street which was not the same as it is today, a street shaded by trees. On the white wall, opposite her bed, a coloured engraving depicted flowers, fruit and leaves, and underneath it was written in large letters: BELLADONNA AND HENBANE. Much later, he discovered that these were poisonous plants, but at the time what interested him was deciphering the letters: belladonna and henbane, the first words he had learnt to read. Another engraving between the two windows: a black bull, its head lowered, which gazed at him with a melancholy expression. This engraving had as its caption: BULL FROM THE POLDERS OF HOLSTEIN, in smaller letters than belladonna and henbane, and harder to read. But he had managed to do so after a few days, and he had even been able to copy out all these words on a pad of notepaper that Annie had given him.

  “If I understand correctly, doctor, they found nothing during the course of their search?”

  “I don’t know. They spent several days rifling through the house from top to bottom. The other people must have hidden something there . . .”

  “And no articles about this search in the newspapers at the time?”

  “No.”

  A whimsical plan ran through Daragane’s mind at that moment. With the royalties for the book of which he had only written two or three pages, he would buy the house. He would select the necessary tools: screwdrivers, hammers, crowbars, pincers, and he would devote himself to a meticulous exploration over several days. He would slowly pull out the wood panelling from the drawing room and the bedrooms and he would smash the mirrors to see what they concealed. He would set about searching for secret staircases and hidden doors. In the end he would be sure to find what he had lost, and what he had never been able to speak about to anyone.

  “You probably came by bus?” Dr Voustraat asked him.

  “Yes.”

  The doctor checked his wristwatch.

  “I can’t take you back to Paris by car unfortunately. The last bus for Porte d’Asnieres leaves in twenty minutes.”

  Outside, they walked along rue de l’Ermitage. They passed in front of the long concrete building that had replaced the garden wall, but Daragane did not wish to recall this vanished wall.

  “A good deal of mist,” said the doctor. “It’s winter already . . .”

  Then they walked in silence, the two of them, the doctor very erect, very upright, the bearing of a former cavalry officer. Daragane could not remember having walked like this, at night, in his childhood, along the streets of Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. Except for once, at Christmas, when Annie had taken him to midnight mass.

  The bus was waiting, the engine turning over. He would evidently be the only passenger.

  “I’ve been delighted to chat with you all afternoon,” said the doctor, holding out his hand. “And I’d love to hear more about your little book on Saint-Leu.”

  At the very moment Daragane was about to get on the bus, the doctor held him by the arm.

  “I was thinking of something . . . about La Maladrerie and all those curious people we spoke about . . . The best witness could be the child who once lived there. You would need to find him . . . don’t you think so?”

  “That will be very difficult, doctor.”

  He sat at the very rear of the bus and looked through the window behind him. Dr Voustraat stood there motionless, probably waiting for the bus to disapp
ear round the first corner. He gave him a wave.

  IN HIS STUDY, HE DECIDED TO RECONNECT THE TELEPHONE and the answering machine in case Chantal Grippay should try to get in touch with him. But no doubt Ottolini, back from the casino at Charbonnières, was not letting her out of his sight. She would have to collect the black dress with swallows. It was hanging there, on the back of the sofa, like those objects that don’t want to leave you and follow you around all your life. Rather like that blue Volkswagen in his youth that he had had to get rid of after a few years. Yet, every time he moved home, he found it parked outside his building—and that had gone on for a long time. The car remained faithful to him and followed him wherever he went. But he had lost the keys. And then, one day, it had disappeared, perhaps into one of those automobile scrap-yards, beyond Porte d’Italie, on the site where they had begun staking out the Autoroute du Sud.

  He wished he could have found “Return to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt”, the first chapter of his first book, but his search would have been pointless. That night, as he was admiring the attractive leaves in the courtyard of the building next door, he realised that he had torn up that chapter. He was certain of it.

  He had also discarded a second chapter: “Place Blanche”, written immediately after “Return to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt”. And so he had started all over again from the beginning with the painful sense that he was correcting a false start. And yet the only memories he retained of this first novel were the two chapters he had discarded that had served as underpinning for everything else, or rather the scaffolding you remove, once the book is finished.

  He had written the twenty pages of “Place Blanche” in a room at 11 rue Coustou, a former hotel. He was living in lower Montmartre again, fifteen years after discovering it because of Annie. In fact, they had ended up there, when they had left Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. And that is why he thought he could write a book more easily if he returned to the places he had known with her.

  They must have changed in appearance since that time, but he was barely aware of the fact. Forty years later, in the twenty-first century, in a taxi one afternoon, he happened to be passing through the neighbourhood. The car had stopped in a traffic jam at the corner of boulevard de Clichy and rue Coustou. For a few minutes, he had not recognised anything, as though he had been struck with amnesia and was merely a stranger in his own city. But for him this was of no importance. The fronts of the buildings and the crossroads had, over the course of years, become an inner landscape that had eventually come to cover over the sleek and well-stuffed Paris of the present day. Over there, on the right, he thought he could see the garage sign in rue Coustou and he would gladly have asked the taxi driver to drop him there so that, after forty years, he could revisit his old room.

  In those days, on the floor above his, they were starting the building works that would transform the old hotel bedrooms into studio flats. In order to write his book without hearing the sounds of hammering on the walls, he took shelter in a café on rue Puget that formed the corner with rue Coustou and was overlooked from his bedroom window.

  In the afternoons, there were no customers in this establishment known as the Aero, a bar rather than a café, to judge by its pale wood panelling, its ornamental ceiling, its equally pale wooden frontage, with a window protected by a sort of moucharaby. A man of about forty, with dark hair, used to stand behind the bar, reading a newspaper. During the course of the afternoon, he would sometimes disappear up a small staircase. The first time, Daragane had called to him so that he could pay his bill, but to no avail. And afterwards, he grew accustomed to his absences and left him a five-franc note on the table.

  He had to wait for a few days before the man spoke to him. Up until then, he ignored him deliberately. Every time Daragane ordered a coffee, the man appeared not to hear him, and Daragane was astonished when he eventually switched on the percolator. He came and placed the coffee cup on the table without even glancing at him. And Daragane sat down at the back of the room as if he himself wished to go unnoticed.

  One afternoon when he had managed to correct a page of his manuscript, he heard a solemn voice:

  “So, are you doing your accounts?”

  He looked up. Over there, behind the bar, the man was smiling at him.

  “You come at the wrong time . . . In the afternoons it’s deserted here.”

  He walked over to his table, still with the same quizzical smile:

  “May I?”

  He pulled out the chair and sat down in front of him. “What exactly are you writing?”

  Daragane hesitated before replying.

  “A detective story.”

  The other man nodded and gave him a searching stare.

  “I live at the building on the corner, but there are refurbishments going on and there’s too much noise to be able to work.”

  “The former Hotel Puget? Opposite the garage?”

  “Yes,” said Daragane. “And you, have you been here long?”

  He would often change the subject in order to avoid talking about himself. His method was to reply to one question with another one.

  “I’ve always been in the neighbourhood. Before that, I ran a hotel, a little further down, on rue Laferrière . . .”

  This word, Laferrière, made his heart thump. When he had left Saint-Leu-la-Forêt with Annie to come to this neighbourhood, they both lived in a room on rue Laferrière. She would be away, from time to time, and she gave him a duplicate key. “If you go for a walk, don’t get lost.” On a sheet of paper folded in four that he kept in his pocket, she had written: “6 rue Laferrière” in her big handwriting.

  “I knew a woman who used to live there,” said Daragane in an expressionless voice. “Annie Astrand.”

  The man looked at him in surprise.

  “Then you really must have been very young. That’s about twenty or so years ago.”

  “I’d say more like fifteen.”

  “I mainly knew her brother Pierre. It was he who lived in rue Laferrière. He ran the garage next door . . . but I haven’t heard anything of him for a long time.”

  “Do you remember her?”

  “Slightly . . . She was very young when she left the neighbourhood. According to what Pierre had told me, she was protected by a woman who ran a nightclub in rue de Ponthieu . . .”

  Daragane wondered whether he was not confusing Annie with someone else. And yet a girlfriend of hers, Colette, often came to Saint-Leu-la-Forêt and, one day, they had driven her back to Paris by car, to a street near the Champs-Élysées gardens where the postage stamp market used to take place. Rue de Ponthieu? The two women had gone into a building together. And he had waited for Annie on the back seat of the car.

  “You don’t know what became of her?”

  The man looked at him somewhat suspiciously.

  “No. Why? Was she really a friend of yours?”

  “I knew her in my childhood.”

  “Well, that changes everything . . . It’s all in the past now . . .”

  He had begun to smile again and he leant over towards Daragane.

  “A longtime ago, Pierre told me that she had had some problems and that she had been in prison.”

  He had used the same words that Perrin de Lara had, the evening of the previous month when he had come across him sitting alone on the terrace of a café. “She had been in prison.” The tone of each of the two men was different: a slightly disdainful, distant manner, in the case of Perrin de Lara, as though Daragane had obliged him to talk about someone who was not from his world; a kind of familiarity in the case of the other, since he knew “her brother Pierre” and because “being in prison” appeared to be fairly commonplace to him. Was it on account of certain customers of his who came, he had explained to Daragane, “after eleven o’clock at night”?

  He thought that Annie would have given him some explanations if she was still alive. Later on, when his book had been published and he had been fortunate enough to see her again, he had not asked her a single q
uestion about this matter. She would not have replied. Neither had he mentioned the room in rue Laferrière, nor the sheet of paper folded in four on which she had written their address. He had lost that sheet of paper. And even if he had been able to keep hold of it for fifteen years and had shown it to her, she would have said: “But, Jean dear, that’s not at all like my handwriting.”

  The man at the Aero did not know why she had been in prison. “Her brother Pierre” had not given him any details about it. But Daragane remembered that the day before they left Saint-Leu-la-Forêt she seemed nervous. She had even forgotten to come to collect him from school at half-past four, and he had returned to the house on his own. That had not really bothered him. It was easy, all you had to do was continue straight along the road. Annie was on the phone in the drawing room. She had given him a wave and had gone on talking on the phone. In the evening, she had taken him to her bedroom, and he watched her filling a suitcase with clothing. He was frightened that she might leave him alone in the house. But she had told him that tomorrow they would both be going to Paris.

  In the night, he had heard voices in Annie’s bedroom. He had recognised that of Roger Vincent. A little later on, the noise from the engine of the American car grew fainter and eventually subsided. He was frightened of hearing her car starting up. And then he fell asleep.

  One late afternoon when he was leaving the Aero after having written two pages of his book—the building works in the former hotel stopped at about six o’clock in the evening—he wondered whether the walks he had been on fifteen years ago while Annie was away had taken him as far as this. There could not have been very many of these walks and they must have been shorter than he remembered. Had Annie really allowed a child to wander around alone in this neighbourhood? The address written in her handwriting on the sheet of paper folded in four—a detail that he could not have invented—was certainly proof of this.