Little by little, without our noticing, the shadows filled my hotel room. She looked at her watch.
“I’ll be late for dinner. My mother-in-law and husband must be waiting for me already.”
She stood up, turned the pillow over, and pulled back the curtains. “I’ve lost an earring.”
Then she got dressed in front of the closet mirror. She slipped on her green camisole and the red linen skirt that clung to her waist. She sat on the edge of the bed and put on her espadrilles.
“I might be back soon, if they’re playing cards. Or else tomorrow morning . . .”
She softly shut the door behind her. I went out onto the balcony and watched her slim silhouette and red skirt in the twilight, moving down the La Varenne quay.
I waited for her all day, lying on the bed in my room. The sun coming through the blinds drew blond spots on the walls and on her skin. Downstairs, in front of the hotel, under the three plane trees, the same boules players kept playing late into the night. We heard them talking and shouting. They had hung light bulbs in the trees, which shone through our blinds too, projecting onto the walls in the darkness rays even brighter than the rays of sunlight. Her blue eyes. Her red dress. Her brown hair. Later, much later, the bright colors faded and I no longer saw anything except in black and white—just as Madame Villecourt had said.
Sometimes she could stay until morning. Her husband had gone on a business trip with the man with the suede shoes, bull’s head, and empty eyes, and with the man’s friend, the one trying to sell the diamond. She didn’t know him, but his name often came up when her husband and Jourdan were talking. His name was Paul.
One night, I woke up with a start. Someone was turning the door handle. I never locked my room, in case Sylvia could get away for a moment and come to me. She walked in. I fumbled for the light.
“No, don’t turn it on.”
At first I thought she was holding out her hand to shield her eyes from the light of the bedside lamp. But she was trying to hide her face from me. Her hair was disheveled and there was a bleeding cut across her cheek.
“My husband . . .”
She dropped onto the edge of the bed. I didn’t have a tissue to wipe the drops of blood off her cheek. “I had a fight with my husband.”
She had lain down next to me. Villecourt’s bulging fingers, his fat little hand, had struck her face . . . The thought of it made me feel like I was going to throw up.
“That’s the last time I’m going to argue with him. We’re leaving.”
“Leaving?”
“Yes. You and me. I have a car downstairs.”
“But where will we go?”
“Look. I took the diamond.”
She slipped her hand under her shirt and showed me the diamond, on a delicate chain around her neck.
“We won’t have money problems with this.”
She took the chain off her neck and slipped it into my hand. “Here, you keep it.”
I put it on the nightstand. The diamond scared me as much as the gash on her cheek.
“It’s ours now,” Sylvia said.
“You really think we should take it?”
She didn’t seem to hear me.
“Jourdan and the other guy will demand what my husband owes them. They won’t let him go until he gives them back the diamond . . .”
She was talking softly, as though someone might be listening at the door.
“And he’ll never be able to give it back. They’ll make him pay . . . That’s what you get for keeping bad company.”
She had brought her face right up to mine and spoken the last sentence into my ear. Then she looked me straight in the eye.
“And I’ll be a widow.”
A nervous laugh shook us. Then she moved even closer to me and turned off the bedside lamp.
The car was parked in front of the hotel under the plane trees, where the men had been playing their interminable game of pétanque. But they were gone, and they had turned off the electric lights in the trees. She wanted to drive. She sat behind the wheel and I got in next to her. A bag was sitting diagonally on the back seat.
We went down Quai de La Varenne one last time, and in my memory the car was driving slowly. I caught sight of the poplars on the small island in the middle of the Marne—saw the island’s tall grass, the gymnastics bars, the swing, the island we used to swim out to, a long time ago, before the water was poisoned. On the opposite shore, the dark mass of the Chennevières hillside. One last time, the buhrstone pavilions slipped past, the half-timbered villas, the chalets, the bungalows, built at the turn of the century with the money from the girls . . . The lawns where someone had planted a linden tree. The large boathouse of the Cercle des Sports de la Marne. The Château des Îles Jochem’s gate and park.
One last time, before she turned right, Le Beach of La Varenne, where it all started—the waterslide, the changing cabins, the arbor in the moonlight, this place that had seemed so fairy-tale in our childhood summers and which, that night, was silent and empty forever.
That was the moment in our lives when we started to feel anxious, a diffuse sense of guilt and the certainty that we had to run away from something, without knowing exactly what. This flight would take us to many different places before finally bringing us here, to Nice.
When Sylvia was lying next to me I couldn’t resist taking the diamond in my fingers, or watching it sparkle on her skin, and thinking that it would bring us bad luck. But I was wrong. Others before us had fought for it, others to come would wear it around their neck for a time, or on their finger, and it would traverse the centuries, hard and indifferent to the passing of time and the deaths of those it would leave behind. No, our anxiety didn’t come from our contact with that cold stone with glints of blue—it doubtless came from life itself.
Still, at first, when we’d just left La Varenne behind, we knew a brief period of calm and peace. At La Baule in Brittany, in August. We’d rented a room next to a miniature golf course, from an agency on Avenue des Lilas. The shouting and laughter of the minigolf players, which went on until almost midnight, lulled us to sleep. We could have a glass of wine without attracting anyone’s notice at one of the tables under the pine trees in front of the kiosk with the green slate roof where they handed out the golf clubs and white balls.
It was very hot that summer, and we were sure no one would find us there. In the afternoons we would walk along the embankment to the most crowded part of the beach. Then we would walk down to the sand, looking for a tiny place free where we could lie on our beach towels. We were never as happy as we were then, lost in a crowd smelling of tanning oil. Children were building sandcastles all around us and the ice cream vendors walked by offering their wares, stepping over the bodies on the sand. We were like everyone else, there was nothing to set us apart from the others, those Sundays in August.
PATRICK MODIANO, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1945, and was educated in Annecy and Paris. He published his first novel, La Place de l’Etoile, in 1968. In 1978, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for Rue des Boutiques Obscures (published in English as Missing Person), and in 1996 he received the Grand Prix National des Lettres for his body of work. Mr. Modiano’s other writings include a book-length interview with the writer Emmanuel Berl and, with Louis Malle, the screenplay for Lacombe Lucien.
DAMION SEARLS has translated thirty books, including Patrick Modiano’s Young Once, and is the author of essays, poems, a book of short stories, and The Inkblots, a history of the Rorschach test and the first biography of its creator, Hermann Rorschach.
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Sundays in August Page 11