Suspended Sentences

by Patrick Modiano

  The air was warm and Roger Vincent hadn’t put down the top of his convertible. He was talking with Little Hélène, and I was thinking too much about those bumper cars we’d just discovered to listen to their grown-up conversation. We drove past the airfield and would soon turn left onto the road that went up to the village. They raised their voices. They weren’t arguing, just talking about Andrée K.

  “Sure she was,” said Roger Vincent. “Andrée was part of the Rue Lauriston gang …”

  “Andrée was part of the Rue Lauriston gang.” That sentence had struck me. In school, we, too, had a gang: the florist’s son, the barber’s son, and two or three others I don’t remember, who all lived on the same street. They called us “the Rue du Docteur-Dordaine gang.” Andrée K. had been part of a gang, like us, but on a different street. That woman who so intimidated my brother and me, with her bangs, her freckles, her green eyes, her cigarettes and mysterious phone calls, now suddenly seemed more like us. Roger Vincent and Little Hélène also seemed to be very familiar with that “Rue Lauriston gang.” Subsequently, I again overheard the name in their conversation and I became used to the sound of it. A few years later, I heard it in the mouth of my father, but I didn’t know that “the Rue Lauriston gang” would haunt me for such a long time.

  When we arrived back on Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, Annie’s 4CV was there. Behind it was a huge motorcycle. In the vestibule, Jean D. told us the motorcycle was his and that he’d come to the house on it all the way from Paris. He hadn’t removed his Canadienne. He promised to take us for a ride on the motorcycle, by turns, but tonight it was too late. Snow White would be back the next morning. Mathilde had already gone to bed, and Annie asked us to go up to our room for a bit because they needed to talk. Roger Vincent went into the living room, leather suitcase in hand. Little Hélène, Annie, and Jean D. followed him in, and they closed the door behind them. I had watched them from the top of the stairs. What could they be saying to each other, there in the living room? I heard the telephone ring.

  After a while, Annie called us. We all ate dinner together at the dining room table: Annie, Little Hélène, Jean D., Roger Vincent, and the two of us. That evening, at dinner, we were not wearing our bathrobes, as usual, but rather our daytime clothes. Little Hélène did the cooking because she was a real cordon bleu.

  We lived on Rue du Docteur-Dordaine for much more than a year. The seasons follow one another in my memory. In winter, at midnight Mass, we were choirboys in the village church. Annie, Little Hélène, and Mathilde attended Mass. Snow White spent Christmas with her family. When we got back, Roger Vincent was at the house, and he told us someone was waiting in the living room. My brother and I went in and found Santa Claus, sitting on the chair with the flowered upholstery next to the telephone. He didn’t speak. He handed each of us, in silence, presents covered in silver paper. But we didn’t have a chance to unwrap them. He stood up and motioned for us to follow. He and Roger Vincent led us to the glass-paneled door that looked out on the courtyard. On the wooden planks we had laid end to end, there was a bumper car colored pale green—the way my brother liked them. Then we had dinner together. Jean D. showed up to join us. He had the same height and movements as Santa Claus. And the same watch.

  Snow on the playground at school. And freezing rains in March. I had discovered that it rained practically every other day and I could predict the weather. I was always right. For the first time in our lives, we went to the movies. With Snow White. It was a Laurel and Hardy film. The apple trees in the garden flowered anew. Once more, I accompanied the Rue du Docteur-Dordaine gang to the mill, whose large wheel was turning again. We began flying kites again, in front of the chateau. We were no longer afraid, my brother and I, of going into the great hall and walking among the rubble and dead leaves. We sat down at the far end, in the elevator, an elevator with two screen doors, made of light paneled wood and with a red leather bench. It had no ceiling and daylight fell from the top of the shaft, through the still intact skylight. We pushed the buttons and pretended to go up to the various floors, where the marquis Eliot Salter de Caussade might have been expecting us.

  But he wasn’t seen in town that year. It was very hot. Flies stuck to the flypaper stretched on the wall of the kitchen. We planned a picnic in the forest with Snow White and Frede’s nephew. What my brother and I liked best was making the bumper car glide over the old planks—a bumper car that we later learned Little Hélène had found through a friend who worked in a fairground.

  On Bastille Day, Roger Vincent took us out to dinner at the Robin des Bois inn. He had come from Paris with Jean D. and Andrée K. We sat at a table in the garden of the inn, a garden decorated with groves and statues. Everyone was there: Annie, Little Hélène, Snow White, and even Mathilde. Annie was wearing her light blue dress and wide black belt that hugged her waist very tight. I was sitting next to Andrée K. and I wanted to ask her about the gang she’d been in, the one on Rue Lauriston, but I didn’t dare.

  And autumn … We went with Snow White to gather chestnuts in the forest. We hadn’t heard from our parents. The last postcard from our mother had been a bird’s-eye view of the city of Tunis. Our father had written us from Brazzaville. Then from Bangui. And after that, nothing. It was the start of the school season. The teacher, after gym, made us rake up the dead leaves on the playground. In the courtyard of the house we let them fall without raking them up, and they took on a rust-red color that clashed with the light green of the bumper car. The latter seemed stuck for all eternity in the middle of a track of dead leaves. We sat in the bumper car, my brother and I, and I leaned on the steering wheel. Tomorrow we would invent a system to make it glide. Tomorrow … Always tomorrow, like those nighttime visits to the marquis de Caussade’s chateau that we kept postponing.

  There was another power outage, and we lit the house with an oil lamp at dinnertime. On Saturday evening, Mathilde and Snow White lit a fire in the dining room fireplace and let us listen to the radio. Sometimes we heard Edith, who was friends with Roger Vincent and Little Hélène. At night, before falling asleep, I leafed through Little Hélène’s photo album, where there were pictures of her, her and her work colleagues. Two particularly impressed me: the American Chester Kingston, whose limbs were as supple as rubber and who could dislocate himself so well that they called him the “puzzle man.” And Alfredo Codona, the trapeze artist Little Hélène told us about so often and who had taught her the trade. That world of circuses and music halls was the only one my brother and I wanted to live in, perhaps because our mother used to take us with her, when we were little, into the wings and dressing rooms of the theaters.

  The others still came to the house. Roger Vincent, Jean D., Andrée K… . And the ones who rang at the door after dark, who I spied on through the slats of the blinds, their faces lit by the bulb above the front door porch. Voices, laughter, and telephone rings. And Annie and Jean D., in the 4CV, in the rain.

  I never saw them in the years that followed, except, once, for Jean D. I was twenty years old. I had a room on Rue Coustou, near Place Blanche. I was trying to write my first book. A friend had invited me out to a neighborhood restaurant. When I went to join him, he was with two other guests: Jean D. and a girl who was with him.

  Jean D. had hardly aged. A few gray hairs on his temples, but he still had his long brush cut. Tiny wrinkles around the eyes. He wasn’t wearing a Canadienne this time, but rather a very elegant gray suit. It occurred to me that we were no longer the same, he and I. Throughout the entire meal, we never once alluded to the old days. He asked what I was doing in life. He used the familiar tu and called me Patrick. He had surely explained to the two others that he’d known me for a long time.

  As for me, I knew a little more about him than when I was a child. That year, the kidnapping of a Moroccan politician had been front-page news. One of the protagonists in the affair had died under mysterious circumstances, on Rue des Renaudes, just as the police broke down his door. Jean D. was a friend of that per
son and the last one to see him alive. He had given testimony that had been reported in the papers. But the articles also contained other details: Jean D. had once served seven years in prison. They didn’t say why, but, judging from the dates, his troubles had begun around the time we lived on Rue du Docteur-Dordaine.

  We didn’t say a word about those articles. I simply asked him if he lived in Paris.

  “I have an office on Faubourg Saint-Honoré. You’ll have to come by …”

  After dinner, my friend disappeared. I found myself alone with Jean D. and the girl who was with him, a brunette who must have been a dozen years younger than he.

  “Can I drop you somewhere?”

  He opened the door of a Jaguar parked in front of the restaurant. I had learned from the newspaper accounts that in certain circles they called him “the Tall Man with the Jaguar.” Since the start of dinner, I’d been looking for a way to ask him about a past that still remained a mystery.

  “Is this car the reason they call you ‘the Tall Man with the Jaguar’?” I asked.

  But he merely shrugged and didn’t answer.

  He wanted to see my room on Rue Coustou. He and the girl, behind me, climbed the narrow staircase whose worn red carpet gave off a funny odor. They came into the room and the girl took the one chair—a wicker armchair. Jean D. remained standing.

  It was strange to see him in that room, in his elegant gray suit and dark silk tie. The girl looked around her and didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the décor.

  “So, you’re a writer? How’s it working out?”

  He leaned over the bridge table and looked at the sheets of paper that I labored to fill, day after day.

  “You write with a Bic?”

  He smiled.

  “Does the place have heat?”

  “No.”

  “But you’re getting by?”

  What could I tell him? That I didn’t know how I was going to find five hundred francs to pay the rent this month? Of course we’d known each other a long time, but that was no reason to unburden myself on him.

  “I’m getting by,” I said.

  “Doesn’t seem like it.”

  For a moment, we faced each other in the window frame. Even though they called him “the Tall Man with the Jaguar,” I was now a little taller than he was. He covered me with a look that was affectionate and naïve, the same as in the days of Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. He rolled his tongue between his lips, and I remember that he’d done that at the house, too, when he was thinking. That way of rolling his tongue between his lips and being lost in thought is something I later discovered in someone else—the writer Emmanuel Berl—and it moved me.

  He kept silent. So did I. His girlfriend was still sitting in the wicker chair and leafing through a magazine that she’d grabbed off the bed. All things considered, it was better that the girl was there, otherwise we would have started talking, Jean D. and I. It hadn’t been easy: I could read it in his eyes. At the first words, we would have collapsed like those puppets in shooting galleries when the pellet hits the mark. Annie, Little Hélène, and Roger Vincent had certainly wound up in jail. I had lost my brother. The thread had snapped—a gossamer strand. There was nothing left of all that …

  He turned to his girlfriend and said:

  “There’s a nice view from here … It’s just like the Côte d’Azur.”

  The window looked out on narrow Rue Puget, where no one ever walked. A shabby bar on the corner, a former Coal and Spirits shop in front of which a solitary streetwalker stood waiting. Always the same. And for nothing.

  “Nice view, eh?”

  Jean D. inspected the room, the bed, the bridge table at which I wrote every day. I saw him from the back. His friend leaned her forehead against the window and contemplated Rue Puget below.

  They left, wishing me good luck. A few moments later, I discovered on the bridge table four five hundred–franc bills, neatly folded. I tried to find the address of his office on Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In vain. And I never again saw the Tall Man with the Jaguar.

  On Thursdays and Saturdays when Snow White wasn’t there, Annie would take my brother and me to Paris in her 4CV. She always followed the same route and, with some effort of memory, I was able to reconstruct it. We took the western highway and drove through the Saint-Cloud tunnel. We crossed a bridge over the Seine, then went along the river through Boulogne and Neuilly. I remember large houses near the banks, protected by fences and foliage. Also barges and floating houses that one reached via wooden stairs: at the foot of those stairs were mailboxes, each with a name on it.

  “I’m going to buy a barge here and we’ll all live on it,” said Annie.

  We arrived at the Porte Maillot. I was able to locate that stop in our itinerary because of the little train in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Annie had taken us on it one afternoon. And we reached the endpoint of our journey, in that zone where Neuilly, Levallois, and Paris all blended together.

  It was a street lined with trees, their leaves forming a vault. No dwellings, only warehouses and garages. We stopped in front of the largest and newest garage, with a tan pedimented façade.

  Inside, a room was blocked off by glass-paneled walls. A man was waiting for us, with curly blond hair, sitting on a leather chair at a metal desk. He was Annie’s age. They spoke familiarly. He was dressed, like Jean D., in a plaid shirt, a suede windbreaker, a Canadienne in winter, and crepe-soled shoes. Privately, my brother and I used to call him “Buck Danny,” because I thought he looked like a character in an illustrated children’s book I was reading at the time.

  What could Annie and Buck Danny have had to talk about? What could they have been up to when the office door was locked from the inside and an orange canvas shade came down over the windows? My brother and I would wander around the garage, which was even more mysterious than the great hall of the chateau abandoned by Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade. One by one we pondered the cars that were missing a fender, a hood, a rubber tire on a wheel. A man in overalls was lying under a convertible and repairing something with a monkey wrench; another, hose in hand, was filling the gas tank of a truck that had come to a halt with a terrible snorting of its engine. One day, we recognized Roger Vincent’s American car, its hood open, and we concluded that Buck Danny and Roger Vincent were friends.

  Sometimes we’d go to meet Buck Danny at his home, in an apartment building on the boulevard, which I now think was Boulevard Berthier. We’d wait for Annie on the sidewalk. She came out with Buck Danny. We’d leave the 4CV parked in front of the building and walk, the four of us, to the garage, down narrow streets lined with trees and warehouses.

  It was cool in the garage, and the smell of gasoline was stronger than the smell of cut grass or water when we sat by the mill wheel. The same kind of shadow floated over certain corners, where neglected cars slumbered. Their bodies shone dimly in that half-light, and I couldn’t stop looking at a metal plaque affixed to the wall, a yellow plaque on which I read a seven-letter name in black letters, the design and sound of which still move me even today: CASTROL.

  One Thursday she took me alone in her 4CV. My brother had gone shopping with Little Hélène in Versailles. We parked in front of the apartment building where Buck Danny lived. But this time, she came back out without him.

  At the garage, he wasn’t in his office. We got back into the 4CV and drove through the narrow streets of the quarter. We lost our way. We turned round and round in those streets that all looked alike, with their trees and their warehouses.

  She finally stopped in front of a brick building, which I now suspect might have been the old Neuilly tollhouse. But what’s the use of trying to find the place? She turned around and stretched her arm toward the back seat, reaching for a Paris map and another object that she showed me and whose purpose I didn’t know: a brown crocodile-skin cigarette case.

  “Here, Patoche, this is for you … It’ll come in handy later on.”

  I contemplated the crocodile-skin case.
It had a metal lining inside and contained two sweet-smelling cigarettes made of blond tobacco. I took them out of the case and, as I was about to thank her for the present and hand her back the two cigarettes, I saw her face, in profile. She was staring straight in front of her. A tear was falling down her cheek. I didn’t dare make a sound, and Frede’s nephew’s statement echoed in my head: “Annie cried all night long at Carroll’s.”

  I fondled the cigarette case. I waited. She turned toward me and smiled.

  “Do you like it?”

  And, with an abrupt movement, she started up. She always made abrupt movements. She always wore men’s jackets and pants. Except at night. Her blond hair was very short. But there was such feminine softness about her, and such frailty … On the road back, I thought about her serious expression, when she sat with Jean D. in the 4CV under the rain.

  I returned to that neighborhood, about twenty years ago, more or less around the time when I’d seen Jean D. again. For the month of July and the month of August, I lived in a tiny room beneath the eaves in Square de Graisivaudan. The sink touched the bed. The foot of the latter was just a few inches from the door and, to enter the room, you had to let yourself topple onto it. I was trying to finish my first book. I walked around the fringes of the sixteenth arrondissement, Neuilly, and Levallois, where Annie used to bring my brother and me on our days off from school. That whole ill-defined zone, which might or might not have still been Paris, and all those streets were wiped off the map when they built the périphérique, taking with them all their garages and their secrets.

  I didn’t think once about Annie when I lived in that neighborhood that we’d driven through together so often. A more distant past haunted me, because of my father.

  He had been arrested one February evening in a restaurant on Rue de Marignan. He didn’t have his identity papers on him. The police were conducting checks because of a new German regulation prohibiting Jews from being in public places after 8 P.M. He had taken advantage of the twilight and a momentary distraction on the detectives’ part at the Black Maria to make his escape.