Suspended Sentences

by Patrick Modiano

  Yesterday was Easter Monday. I was walking along the portion of Boulevard Saint-Michel that stretches from the old Luxembourg station to Port-Royal. Strollers were crowded around the entrance gates to the gardens, but where I was walking there was practically no one. One afternoon, on that same stretch of sidewalk, Jansen had pointed out the bookstore at the corner of the boulevard and tiny Rue Royer-Collard. In it, just before the war, he had seen an exhibit of photographs by the painter Wols. He’d gotten to know the artist and admired him as much as he did Capa. He’d gone to visit him in Cassis, where Wols had taken refuge at the start of the Occupation. It was Wols who had taught him to photograph his shoes.

  That day, Jansen had drawn my attention to the façade of the Ecole des Mines, an entire section of which, at eye level, was riddled with bullet holes. A plaque, cracked and slightly worn around the edges, noted that a certain Jean Monvallier Boulogne, age twenty, had been killed at that spot on the day Paris was liberated.

  I’d remembered that name because of its sonority, which conjured up images of rowing a boat in the Bois de Boulogne with a blonde, a country picnic on the riverbank, a small valley with that same blonde and some friends—all of it cut short one afternoon in August, in front of this wall.

  Now, that Monday, to my great surprise, the plaque had disappeared, and I was sorry that Jansen, on the afternoon when we were in that same spot together, hadn’t taken a picture of it and the bullet-pocked wall. I would have put it in the index. But now, suddenly, I was no longer sure Jean Monvallier Boulogne had ever existed, and moreover I was no longer sure of anything.

  I entered the gardens, slicing through the people massed around the fence. Every bench and every chair was filled and the paths were crowded. Young people were sitting on the terrace rails and the steps leading down to the main fountain, so thick that you couldn’t get to that part of the garden. But none of it mattered. I was happy to lose myself in that crowd and—as Jansen would have said—to blend into the surroundings.

  Enough space remained—about eight inches—for me to sit at the end of a bench. My neighbors didn’t even need to squeeze over. We were beneath chestnut trees that protected us from the sun, right near the white marble statue of Velléda. A woman behind me was chatting with a friend and their words lulled me: something about a certain Suzanne, who had been married to a certain Raymond. Raymond was a friend of Robert, and Robert the brother of one of the women. At first I tried to pay attention to what they were saying and gather some details that could act as reference points, so that the fates of Robert, Suzanne, and Raymond would gradually emerge from obscurity. Who knows? It’s possible that, by chance, whose infinite combinations will always remain a mystery, Suzanne, Robert, and Raymond might have crossed paths with Jansen one day in the street.

  I was overcome by drowsiness. Words still reached me through a sundrenched fog: Raymond … Suzanne … Livry-Gargan … When you get down to it … Eye problems … Eze-sur-Mer, near Nice … The firehouse on Boulevard Diderot … The flow of passersby along the paths compounded this state of half-sleep. I recalled Jansen’s reflection, “Don’t let it faze you, kid. I’ve fallen into my share of black holes too …” But this time, it wasn’t a black hole like the one I’d experienced at nineteen at the Café de la Paix. I was almost relieved at this progressive loss of identity. I could still make out a few words, as the women’s voices became softer, more distant. La Ferté-Alais … Skirt-chaser … Repaid in kind … Camper … Trip around the world …

  I was going to disappear in this garden, amid the Easter Monday crowds. I was losing my memory and couldn’t understand French anymore, as the words of the women next to me had now become no more than onomatopoeias in my ear. The efforts I’d made for thirty years to have a trade, give my life some coherence, try to speak and write a language as best I could so as to be certain of my nationality—all that tension suddenly released. It was over. I was nothing now. Soon I would slip out of this park toward a metro stop, then a train station and a port. When the gates closed, all that would remain of me would be the raincoat I’d been wearing, rolled into a ball on a bench.

  I remember that in the final days before he dropped out of sight, Jansen seemed at once absent and more preoccupied than usual. I’d say something to him and he wouldn’t answer. Or else, as if I’d interrupted his train of thought, he’d jump and politely ask me to repeat what I’d just said.

  One evening, I had walked with him to his hotel on Boulevard Raspail, for it was less and less often that he slept in the studio. He’d pointed out that the hotel was only a hundred yards away from the one he’d lived in when he first came to Paris and that it had taken him almost thirty years to travel that short distance.

  His face darkened and I could sense he wanted to tell me something. Finally he made up his mind to talk, but with such reticence that his statements were muddled, as if he had trouble expressing himself in French. From what I could understand, he had gone to the Belgian and Italian consulates to get a copy of his birth certificate and other documents he needed in anticipation of his departure. There had been some confusion. From Antwerp, his birthplace, they had sent the Italian consulate the records for a different Francis Jansen, and that one was dead.

  I suppose he’d called from the studio to get further information about this homonym, since I found the following words on the flyleaf of the notebook in which I’d indexed his photos, scrawled in his near illegible handwriting, in Italian, as if they had been dictated to him: “Jansen Francis, nato a Herenthals in Belgio il 25 aprile 1917. Arrestato a Roma. Detenuto a Roma, Fossoli campo. Deportato da Fossoli il 26 giugno 1944. Deceduto in luogo e data ignoti.”

  That evening, we had walked by his hotel and continued on toward the Carrefour Montparnasse. He no longer knew which man he was. He told me that after a certain number of years, we accept a truth that we’ve intuited but kept hidden from ourselves, out of carelessness or cowardice: a brother, a double died in our stead on an unknown date and in an unknown place, and his shadow ends up merging with us.

  SUSPENDED SENTENCES

  For Dominique

  There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a great alleviation of idle hours. A man’s claim to his own past is yet less valid.

  —Robert Louis Stevenson,

  “A Chapter on Dreams”

  It was in the days when theater companies toured not just France, Switzerland, and Belgium, but also North Africa. I was ten years old. My mother had gone on the road for a play, and my brother and I were living with friends of hers, in a small town just outside of Paris.

  A two-story house with an ivy-covered façade. One of the windows—the kind they call bow windows—extended from the living room. Behind the house, a terraced garden. Hidden at the back of the first terrace, under a clematis, was the grave of Doctor Guillotin. Had he lived in that house? Was it where he’d perfected his device for severing heads? At the very top of the garden were two apple trees and a pear tree.

  Small enamel tags hanging from silver chains around the liquor decanters bore names like Izarra, Sherry, Curaçao. Honeysuckle invaded the sloping roof of the well, in the middle of the courtyard just before the garden. The telephone sat on a pedestal table next to one of the living room windows.

  A fence protected the front of the house, which stood back slightly from Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. One day they’d repainted the fence after coating it with red lead. Was it really red lead, that sickly orange coating that remains so vivid in my memory? Rue du Docteur-Dordaine looked like a village street, especially at the far end: a nuns’ convent, then a farm where we went to get milk, and beyond that, the chateau. If you walked down the street on the right-hand sidewalk, you went past the post office; across the street, on the left, you could make out behind a fence the nursery of the florist whose son sat next to me in class. A little farther on, on the
same side as the post office, the wall of the Jeanne d’Arc school, tucked away behind the leaves of the plane trees.

  Opposite our house was a gently sloping avenue. It was bordered on the right by the Protestant temple and by a small wooded area, in the thickets of which we’d found a German soldier’s helmet; on the left, by a long, white house with pediments, which had a large garden and a weeping willow. Farther down, adjacent to the garden, was the Robin des Bois inn.

  At the bottom of the avenue, and perpendicular to it, was the main road. Toward the right, the perpetually deserted square in front of the train station, where we learned how to ride bikes. In the other direction, you skirted the town park. On the left-hand sidewalk was a kind of concrete mall that housed, all in a row, the news dealer’s, the movie theater, and the drugstore. The druggist’s son was one of my schoolmates and, one night, his father hanged himself from a rope that he’d attached to the mall balcony. It seems people hang themselves in summer. In the other seasons, they prefer drowning in rivers. That’s what the mayor had told the news dealer.

  After that, an empty lot where they held the market every Friday. Sometimes the big top of a traveling circus set up there, or the stalls of a fairground.

  You then came to the town hall and the grade crossing. After passing over the latter, you followed the high road that went up to the church square and the monument to the dead. For one Christmas Mass, my brother and I had been choirboys in that church.

  There were only women in the house where the two of us lived.

  Little Hélène was a brunette of about forty, with a wide forehead and prominent cheekbones. Her very short stature made her seem more like us. She had a slight limp from an accident on the job. She had been a circus rider, then an acrobat, and that gave her a certain cachet in our eyes. The circus—as my brother and I had discovered one afternoon at the Médrano—was a world we wanted to join. She told us she’d stopped plying her trade a long time ago and she showed us a photo album with pictures of her in her rider’s and acrobat’s costumes, and pages from music hall programs that mentioned her name: Hélène Toch. I often asked her to lend me the album so I could look through it in bed, before going to sleep.

  They formed a curious trio: she, Annie, and Annie’s mother, Mathilde F. Annie had short blond hair, a straight nose, a soft, delicate face, and light-colored eyes. But there was a toughness about her that clashed with the softness of her face, perhaps due to the old brown leather jacket—a man’s jacket—that she wore over very tight black trousers during the day. In the evening, she often wore a light blue dress cinched at the waist by a wide black belt, and I liked her better that way.

  Annie’s mother didn’t look anything like her. Was she really her mother? Annie called her Mathilde. Gray hair in a bun. A hard face. Always dressed in dark clothes. I was scared of her. To me she looked old, and yet she really wasn’t: Annie was twenty-six at the time and her mother about fifty. I remember the cameos she pinned to her blouse. She had a southern accent that I later heard in natives of Nîmes. Annie didn’t sound like that herself; like my brother and me, she had a Paris accent.

  Whenever Mathilde talked to me, she called me “blissful idiot.” One morning as I was coming down from my room for breakfast, she’d said as usual:

  “Good morning, blissful idiot.”

  And I’d said:

  “Good morning, Madame.”

  And after all these years, I can still hear her answer in her cutting voice with its Nîmes accent:

  “‘Madame’? You can call me Mathilde, blissful idiot.”

  Little Hélène, beneath her kindness, must have been tough as nails.

  I learned later that she’d met Annie when the latter was nineteen. She wielded such influence over Annie and her mother, Mathilde F., that the two women had gone off with her, abandoning Mr. F.

  One day, no doubt, the circus Little Hélène worked in had stopped in the provincial backwater where Annie and her mother lived. Annie had sat near the orchestra, and the trumpets announced the arrival of Little Hélène, who was riding a black stallion with a silver caparison. Or else I imagine her way up high, on the trapeze, getting ready for the perilous triple flip.

  And Annie goes to see her after the show, in the trailer that Little Hélène shares with the snake lady.

  A friend of Annie F.’s often came to the house. Her name was Frede. Today, from my adult perspective, she’s nothing more than a woman who, in the 1950s, owned a nightclub on Rue Ponthieu. At the time, she seemed to be the same age as Annie, but she was actually a bit older, around thirty-five. A short-haired brunette, with a sylphlike body and pale skin. She wore men’s jackets, cinched at the waist, which I took to be riding jackets.

  The other day, at a bookstall, I was leafing through an old back issue of La Semaine à Paris from July 1939, which had the movie, theater, music hall, and cabaret listings. I was surprised to come across a tiny photo of Frede: when she was twenty, she was already master of ceremonies in a nightclub. I bought this program, the way you buy a piece of evidence, some tangible proof that it wasn’t all in your head.

  It reads:

  THE SILHOUETTE

  58, Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette

  Montmartre, TRI 64-72

  FREDE presents

  from 10 p.m. til dawn

  her all-female Dance-Cabaret

  Back from Switzerland

  DON MARYO and his famous Orchestra

  Guitarist Isidore Langlois

  Betty and the Nice Boys

  And, fleetingly, I recall the image my brother and I had of Frede whenever we saw her in the garden, as we were returning home from school: a woman who belonged to the world of the circus, like Little Hélène, and whom this world haloed in mystery. We were absolutely certain that Frede operated a circus in Paris, a smaller one than the Médrano, a circus beneath a white canvas big top with red stripes that was called “Carroll’s.” This name was frequently heard in Annie’s and Frede’s mouths: Carroll’s was a nightclub on Rue de Ponthieu, but I imagined the white-and-red big top and the circus animals, of which Frede, with her svelte silhouette and cinched jackets, was the tamer.

  Sometimes on Thursdays, when we didn’t have school, she brought her nephew to the house, a boy our age. And the three of us would spend the afternoon playing together. He knew much more than we did about Carroll’s. I remember a sibylline statement he’d made to us, which still resonates with me:

  “Annie cried all night long at Carroll’s …”

  Perhaps he’d heard that sentence from his aunt, without knowing what it meant. When she didn’t bring him, my brother and I would go meet him at the train station, in the early afternoon. We never called him by his name, which we didn’t know. We just called him “Frede’s nephew.”

  They hired a girl to come pick me up at school and look after us. She lived in the house, in the room next to ours. She wore her black hair in a very strict bun, and her eyes were of such light green that her gaze seemed transparent. She almost never spoke. Her silence and transparent eyes intimidated my brother and me. For us, Little Hélène, Frede, and even Annie belonged to the world of the circus, but that silent young girl with her black bun and pale eyes was a creature from a fairy tale. We called her Snow White.

  I still remember dinners when we were all together in the room that served as dining room, which was separated from the living room by the entrance hall. Snow White was sitting at the end of the table, my brother to her right, and I to her left. Annie was next to me, Little Hélène opposite, and Mathilde at the other end of the table. One evening, because the electricity was out, the room was lit by an oil lamp set on the mantelpiece, which left areas of shadow around us.

  The others called her Snow White, like us, and sometimes “my lamb.” They used the familiar tu with her. And soon a certain intimacy grew among them, since Snow White also addressed them familiarly.

  I suppose they had rented the house. Unless Little Hélène owned it, as the village merchants seemed
to know her. Or maybe the house belonged to Frede. I remember that Frede received a lot of mail at Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. I was the one who fetched the letters from the box, every morning before school.

  Almost every day, Annie went to Paris in her tan Peugeot 4CV. She would come home very late, and sometimes she stayed out until the next day. Often Little Hélène went with her. Mathilde never left the house, except to do the shopping. She’d buy a magazine called Noir et Blanc, old copies of which lay around the dining room. I’d leaf through them on Thursday afternoons, when it was raining and we were listening to a children’s program on the radio. Mathilde ripped Noir et Blanc out of my hands.

  “That’s not for you, blissful idiot! You’re not old enough …”

  Snow White waited for me when class got out, with my brother, who was still too little to start school. Annie had enrolled me in the Jeanne d’Arc school, at the very end of Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. The principal had asked if she was my mother and she’d said yes.

  We were both sitting outside the principal’s office. Annie was wearing her old leather jacket and a pair of faded blue denim pants that a friend of hers who sometimes came to the house—Zina Rachevsky—had brought her back from America: blue jeans. You didn’t see them very often in France at the time. The principal looked at us suspiciously:

  “Your son will have to wear a gray smock in class,” she said. “Like all his other little schoolmates.”

  On the way back, all along Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, Annie walked next to me with her hand on my shoulder.

  “I told her I was your mother because it was too complicated to explain the situation. That okay with you, Patoche?”

  As for me, I was wondering about that gray smock I’d have to wear, like all my other little schoolmates.

  I didn’t remain a pupil at the Jeanne d’Arc school for long. The schoolyard was black because it was paved with coal slag. And that black went perfectly with the bark and leaves of the plane trees.