The following year, they had apprehended him at home. They had taken him to a holding cell, then to an annex of the Drancy transit camp, in Paris, on the Quai de la Gare—a vast merchandise depot where all the Jewish belongings the Germans had looted were being stored: furniture, dishware, linens, toys, carpets, and artworks, arranged by level and section as if in a huge department store. The prisoners emptied the cases as they arrived and filled other cases heading for Germany.
One night, someone showed up in an automobile at the Quai de la Gare and had my father released. I imagined—rightly or wrongly—that it was a certain Louis Pagnon, whom they called “Eddy” and who was shot after the Liberation with members of the Rue Lauriston gang, to which he belonged.
Yes, someone got my father out of the “hole,” to use the expression he’d employed one evening when I was fifteen, when I was alone with him and he’d strayed very close to confiding a few things. I felt, that evening, that he would have liked to hand me down his experience of the murky and painful episodes in his life, but that he couldn’t find the words. Was it Pagnon or someone else? I needed answers to my questions. What possible connection could there have been between that man and my father? A chance encounter before the war? In the period when I lived in Square de Graisivaudan, I tried to elucidate the mystery by attempting to track down Pagnon. I had gotten authorization to consult the old archives. He was born in Paris, in the tenth arrondissement, between République and the Canal Saint-Martin. My father had also spent his childhood in the tenth arrondissement, but a bit farther over, near the Cité d’Hauteville. Had they met in school? In 1932, Pagnon had received a light sentence from the court of Mont-de-Marsan for “operating a gambling parlor.” Between 1937 and 1939, he had worked in a garage in the seventeenth arrondissement. He had known a certain Henri, a sales representative for Simca automobiles, who lived near the Porte des Lilas, and someone named Edmond Delehaye, a foreman at the Savary auto repair in Aubervilliers. The three men got together often; all three worked with cars. The war came, and the Occupation. Henri started a black market operation. Edmond Delehaye acted as his secretary, and Pagnon as driver. They set up shop in a private hotel on Rue Lauriston, near Place de l’Etoile, with a few other unsavory individuals. Those hoods—to use my father’s expression—slowly got sucked into the system: from black marketeering, they’d moved into doing the police’s dirty work for the Germans.
Pagnon had been involved in a smuggling case that the police report called “the Biarritz stockings affair.” It concerned a large quantity of socks that Pagnon collected from various black marketeers in the area. He bundled them in packs of a dozen and dropped them off near the Bayonne train station. They had filled six boxcars with them. In the deserted Paris of the Occupation years, Pagnon drove a fancy car, owned a racehorse, lived in a luxurious furnished apartment on Rue des Belles-Feuilles, and had the wife of a marquis for a mistress. With her, he frequented the riding club in Neuilly, Barbizon, the Fruit Défendu restaurant in Bougival … When had my father met Pagnon? At the time of the Biarritz stockings affair? Who can say? One afternoon in 1939, in the seventeenth arrondissement, my father had stopped at a garage to have a tire changed on his Ford, and there was Pagnon. They had chatted awhile; maybe Pagnon had asked him for a favor or some advice. They’d gone off to have a drink at a nearby café with Henri and Edmond Delahaye … One meets the strangest people in one’s life.
I had hung around the Porte des Lilas, hoping there was still someone who remembered a Simca dealer who’d lived near there around 1939. A certain Henri. But no, it didn’t ring any bells for anyone. In Aubervilliers, on Avenue Jean-Jaurès, the Savary repair shop that had employed Edmond Delahaye was long gone. And the garage in the seventeenth arrondissement where Pagnon worked? If I managed to track it down, an old mechanic might tell me about Pagnon and—I hoped—my father. And I would finally know everything I needed to know, everything my father knew.
I had drawn up a list of garages in the seventeenth, preferably those located at the edge of the arrondissement. I had an intuition that Pagnon had worked in one of these:
Garage des Réservoirs
Société Ancienne du Garage-Auto-Star
Van Zon
Vicar and Co.
Villa de l’Auto
Garage Côte d’Azur
Garage Caroline
Champerret-Marly-Automobiles
Cristal Garage
De Korsak
Eden Garage
L’Etoile du Nord
Auto-Sport Garage
Garage Franco-Américain
S.O.C.O.V.A.
Majestic Automobiles
Garage des Villas
Auto-Lux
Garage Saint-Pierre
Garage de la Comète
Garage Bleu
Matford-Automobiles
Diak
Garage du Bois des Caures
As Garage
Dixmude-Palace-Auto
Buffalo-Transports
Duvivier (R) S.A.R.L.
Autos-Remises
Lancien Frère
Garage aux Docks de la Jonquière
Today, I tell myself that the garage where Annie brought me and my brother must be on that list. Perhaps it was the same as Pagnon’s. I can still see the leaves on the trees lining the sidewalks, the wide tan pedimented façade … They tore it down with the others, and all those years have become, for me, nothing but a long and vain search for a lost garage.
Annie took me to another area of Paris that I later had no trouble recognizing: Avenue Junot, in Montmartre. She parked the 4CV in front of a small white building with a glass-paneled door made of cast iron. She told me to wait. She wouldn’t be long. She went into the building.
I walked down the avenue. Perhaps the liking I’ve always had for that neighborhood comes from then. A sharply vertical flight of steps led to another street below, and I had fun going down it. I walked for a few yards on Rue Caulaincourt, but I never strayed too far. I went back up the steps quickly, afraid that Annie would drive away in her 4CV and leave me behind.
But she wasn’t there yet and I had to wait some more, the way we used to wait in the garage, when the orange shade was drawn behind the window of Buck Danny’s office. She came out of the building with Roger Vincent. He smiled at me. He pretended to be running into me by chance.
“Well, what do you know … Fancy meeting you here!”
For days afterward, he would say to Andrée K., Jean D., or Little Hélène:
“It’s funny … I ran into Patoche in Montmartre … I wonder what he could have been doing there …”
And he turned to me:
“Don’t breathe a word. The less you say, the better.”
On Avenue Junot, Annie kissed him. She called him “Roger Vincent” and used the formal vous, but she kissed him.
“Someday I’ll have you up to my place,” Roger Vincent said to me. “I live here.”
And he pointed to the cast-iron front door of the small white building.
The three of us strolled along the sidewalk. His American car wasn’t parked in front of his building and I asked him why.
“I keep it in the garage across the way.”
We walked past the Hôtel Alsina, near the flight of steps. One time, Annie said:
“That’s where I lived, at first, with Little Hélène and Mathilde … You should have seen the face Mathilde used to make …”
Roger Vincent smiled. And I, without realizing it, absorbed everything they said and their words were etched in my memory.
Much later, I married and lived in that neighborhood for a few years. Almost every day I walked up Avenue Junot. One afternoon, something just came over me: I pushed open the glass-paneled door of the white building. I rang at the concierge’s lodge. A red-haired man stuck his head through the opening.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for someone who lived in this building, about twenty years ago …”
“
Oh, well, I wasn’t here then, Monsieur.”
“You wouldn’t happen to know how I might get some information about him?”
“Go ask at the garage across the street. They used to know everybody.”
But I didn’t go ask at the garage across the street. I had spent so many years looking for garages in Paris that I no longer believed in them.
In summer the days grew longer, and Annie, who wasn’t as strict as Snow White, let us play in the evening in the gently sloping avenue in front of the house. On those evenings we didn’t wear our bathrobes. After dinner, Annie walked us to the door and gave me her wristwatch:
“You can play until nine-thirty. At nine-thirty, you’re to come in. Keep an eye on the time, Patoche—I’m counting on you.”
When Jean D. was there, he would lend me his huge watch. He set it so that at precisely nine-thirty, a little bell—like on an alarm clock—would tell us it was time to go back inside.
The two of us walked down the avenue to the main road where the occasional car was still passing by. A hundred yards away to the right was the train station, a small, weather-beaten, half-timbered structure that looked like a seaside villa. In front of it, a deserted esplanade bordered by trees and the Café de la Gare.
One Thursday, my father didn’t come by car with a friend but by train. At the end of the afternoon, the two of us accompanied him to the station. And since we were early, he took us to the terrace of the Café de la Gare. My brother and I had Coca-Colas, and he a brandy.
He had paid the bill and stood up to go catch his train. Before leaving us, he said:
“Don’t forget … If by chance you see the marquis de Caussade at the chateau, be sure to tell him Albert says hello.”
At the corner of the main road and the avenue, protected by a clump of privet hedges, we spied on the station. From time to time, a group of travelers emerged and fanned out toward the town, the water mill on the Bièvre, the Food Hamlet. The travelers grew increasingly scarce. Soon, only one person was left in the esplanade. The marquis de Caussade? That night, for sure, we’d have our big adventure and go up to the chateau. But we knew perfectly well that the plan would always be put off until tomorrow.
We stood still for a long time in front of the hedges that protected the Robin des Bois inn. We eavesdropped on the conversations of diners seated at the tables in the garden. The hedges concealed them, but their voices were very near. We could hear the tinkling of silverware, the waiters’ steps crunching on the gravel. The aroma of certain dishes mixed with the scent of privet. But the latter was stronger. The entire avenue smelled like privet.
Up ahead, a light went on in the bow window of the living room. Roger Vincent’s American car was parked in front of the house. That evening, he’d come with Andrée K., “the wife of the big-shot doctor,” the one who’d been part of the Rue Lauriston gang and who used tu with Roger Vincent. It wasn’t nine-thirty yet, but Annie emerged from the house, her light blue dress belted at the waist. We crossed the avenue again, as fast as possible, crouching low, and hid behind the bushes of the wooded area next to the Protestant temple. Annie came closer. Her blond hair formed a stain on the twilight. We could hear her footsteps. She was trying to find us. It was a game we played. Each time, we hid in a different spot, in the abandoned lot that the trees and vegetation had taken over. She always ended up finding our hiding place, because we would break out in hysterical laughter when she got too close. The three of us went back to the house. She was a child, like us.
Some sentences remain etched in your mind forever. One afternoon there was a kind of fair in the yard of the Protestant temple, across from the house. From our bedroom window, we had a plunging view of the little stalls around which children crowded with their parents. At lunch, Mathilde had said to me:
“How would you like to go to the festival at the temple, blissful idiot?”
She took us. We bought a lottery ticket and won two packets of nougat. On the way back, Mathilde said:
“They let you in because I’m a Protestant, blissful idiot!”
She was stern as ever, wearing her cameo and black dress.
“And let’s get one thing straight: Protestants see everything! There’s nothing you can hide from them! They don’t only have two eyes—they also have one in the back of their heads! You got that?”
She pointed to her bun.
“You got that, blissful idiot? An eye in the back of our heads!”
From then on, my brother and I felt nervous in her presence, especially when we were passing behind her back. It took me a long time to realize that Protestants were just like anyone else and not to cross the street when I saw one coming.
Never will another sentence have the same resonance for us. It was like Roger Vincent’s smile: I’ve never met one like it. Even in Roger Vincent’s absence, that smile floated in the air. I also remember a sentence that Jean D. said. One morning, he had taken me on his motorcycle up to the Versailles road. He wasn’t going too fast, and I held on to his Canadienne. On the way back, we stopped at the Robin des Bois inn to buy some cigarettes. The manageress was alone at the bar, a very pretty young blonde who wasn’t the one my father had known, back when he’d frequented the inn with Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade, and perhaps with Eddy Pagnon.
“A pack of Baltos,” Jean D. said.
The manageress handed him the pack of cigarettes, flashing both of us a smile. When we left the inn, Jean D. said to me in a serious voice:
“You know, old man … Women … They seem great from a distance, but up close, you’ve got to watch yourself.”
He suddenly looked very sad.
One Thursday we were playing on the knoll near the chateau. Little Hélène was watching us, sitting on the bench where Snow White normally sat. We climbed up the branches of the pine trees. I had climbed too high and, while moving from one branch to the next, I nearly fell. When I climbed down from the tree, Little Hélène was pale as a ghost. That day she was wearing her riding breeches and her mother-of-pearl bolero jacket.
“That wasn’t smart … You could have been killed!”
I had never heard her use such a harsh tone.
“Don’t ever do that again!”
I was so unused to seeing her angry that I felt like crying.
“I had to give up my career because of a stupid stunt like that.”
She took me by the shoulder and yanked me to the stone bench under the trees. She made me sit down. She took a crocodile-skin wallet from the inside pocket of her bolero jacket—the same color as the cigarette case Annie had given me, presumably from the same store. And from that wallet, she extracted a piece of paper and handed it to me.
“You know how to read?”
It was a newspaper clipping with a photo. I read the headline: TRAPEZE ARTIST HÉLÈNE TOCH IN SERIOUS ACCIDENT. MUSTAPHA AMAR AT HER BEDSIDE. She took back the clipping and returned it to her wallet.
“Accidents can happen very suddenly in life … I used to be like you—clueless … I was very trusting.”
She seemed to have second thoughts about talking to me in such an adult way.
“Come on, let’s go have a snack. We’ll get something at the pastry shop …”
All along Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, I hung back a bit to watch her walk. She had a slight limp. It had never occurred to me before then that she hadn’t always limped. So, accidents could happen in life. That revelation troubled me deeply.
The afternoon when I’d gone to Paris alone in Annie’s 4CV and she had given me the crocodile cigarette case, we had eventually found our way through the small streets, now demolished, of the seventeenth arrondissement. We followed the quays along the Seine, as usual. We stopped for a moment on the riverbank near Neuilly and the Ile de Puteaux. From the top of the wooden stairs that led to the light-colored pontoons, we gazed over the floating houses and barges converted into apartments.
“We’re going to have to move soon, Patoche … And this is where I want to liv
e …”
She had already mentioned this to us, several times. We were a bit worried at the prospect of leaving the house and our town. But to live on one of those barges … Day after day, we waited to set off on this new adventure.
“We’ll make a room for the two of you. With portholes … We’ll have a big living room and a bar …”
She was musing aloud. We got back into the 4CV. After the Saint-Cloud tunnel, on the highway, she turned toward me. She looked at me with eyes that shone even brighter than usual.
“You know what you should do? Every evening, you should write down what you did that day. I’ll buy you a special notebook …”
It was a good idea. I stuck my hand in my pocket to reassure myself I still had the cigarette case.
Certain objects disappear from your life at the first lapse in attention, but that cigarette case has remained. I knew it would always be within reach, in a nightstand drawer, on a shelf in a clothes closet, at the back of a desk, in the inner pocket of a jacket. I was so sure of it, of its presence, that I usually forgot all about it. Except when I was feeling down. Then I would ponder it from every angle. It was the only object that bore witness to a period of my life I couldn’t talk to anyone about, and whose very reality I sometimes doubted.
Still, I almost lost it one day. I was in one of those schools where I bided my time until the age of seventeen. My cigarette case caught the eye of two twin brothers from the upper bourgeoisie. They had loads of cousins in the other grades, and their father bore the title “top marksman in France.” If they all banded against me, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
The only way to escape them was to get myself expelled as fast as possible. I ran away one morning, and I took the opportunity to visit Chantilly, Mortefontaine, Ermenonville, and the Abbey of Chaalis. I returned to school at dinnertime. The principal announced my expulsion but he couldn’t reach my parents. My father had left for Colombia some time before, to check out a silver mine a friend had told him about; my mother was on tour near La Chaux-de-Fonds. They quarantined me in a room in the nurse’s station until someone could come collect me. I wasn’t allowed to go to class or take my meals in the dining hall with my schoolmates. This kind of diplomatic immunity kept me safe from the two brothers, their cousins, and the top marksman in France. Every night before going to sleep, I verified the presence under my pillow of the crocodile cigarette case.
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