Out of the Dark

by Patrick Modiano

I climbed the stairs without any objection from him. Maybe he couldn’t tell the difference between Van Bever and me. Or else he didn’t feel like worrying about people’s comings and goings anymore, in this hotel that was about to be closed down.

  I left the door of the room ajar so that I would be sure to hear him when he called me to the telephone. I put the suitcase flat on the floor and stretched out on Jacqueline’s bed. The smell of ether clung stubbornly to the pillow. Had she been taking it again? Would that smell be forever associated in my mind with Jacqueline?

  At ten o’clock I began to worry: she would never call, and I would never see her again. I often expected people I had met to disappear at any moment, not to be heard from again. I myself sometimes arranged to meet people and never showed up, and sometimes I even took advantage of the momentary distraction of someone I was walking with in the street to disappear. A porte-cochere on the Place Saint-Michel had often been extremely useful to me. Once you passed through it you could cross a courtyard and come out on the Rue de l’Hirondelle. And in a little black notebook I had made a list of all the apartment buildings with two exits….

  I heard the man’s voice in the stairway: telephone for room 3. It was ten fifteen and I had already given up on her. She had slipped away from Cartaud. She was in the seventeenth arrondissement. She asked if I had the suitcase. I was to pack her clothes in an overnight bag and go get my things as well from the Hôtel de Lima, then wait for her in the Café Dante. But I had to get away from the Quai de la Tournelle as quickly as possible, because that was the first place Cartaud would come looking. She spoke in a very calm voice, as if she had prepared all this in her head beforehand. I found an old overnight bag in the closet and in it I put her two pairs of pants, her leather jacket, her bras, her pairs of red espa–drilles, her turtleneck sweater, and the various toiletries lined up on the shelf above the sink, among them a bottle of ether. There was nothing left but Van Bever’s clothes. I left the light on so the concierge would think someone was still in the room, and I closed the door behind me. What time would Van Bever come back? He might very well join us at the Café Dante. Had she called him in Forges or Dieppe, and had she said the same thing to him as she’d said to me?

  I left the stairway light off as I went downstairs. I didn’t want to attract the concierge’s attention carrying this suitcase and overnight bag. He was hunched over a newspaper, doing the crossword puzzle. I couldn’t help looking at him as I walked by, but he didn’t even lift his head. Out on the Quai de la Tournelle, I was afraid I might hear someone behind me shouting ‘Monsieur, monsieur… Would you please come back at once….’ And I was also expecting to see Cartaud pull alongside me and stop. But once I got to the Rue des Bemardins I calmed down. I quickly went up to my room and put the few clothes and the two books I had left into Jacqueline’s bag.

  Then I went downstairs and asked for the bill. The night concierge asked me no questions. Outside on the Boulevard Saint-Germain I felt the same euphoria that always welled up in me when I was about to run away.

  Chapter 9

  I sat down at the table in the back of the café and laid the suitcase down flat on the bench. No one sitting at the tables. Only one customer was standing at the bar. On the wall above the cigarettes, the hands of the clock pointed to ten thirty. Next to me, the pinball machine was quiet for the first time. Now I was sure she would come and meet me.

  She came in, but she didn’t look around for me right away. She went to buy some cigarettes at the counter. She sat down. She spotted the suitcase, then put her elbows on the table and let out a long sigh.

  ‘I managed to get rid of him,’ she told me.

  They were having dinner in a restaurant near the Place Pereire, she, Cartaud, and another couple. She wanted to get away at the end of the meal, but from the terrace of the restaurant they might have been able to see her walking toward the taxi stand or the métro entrance.

  They had left the restaurant, and she had no choice but to get into a car with them. They’d taken her to a nearby bar, in a hotel called Les Marronniers, for one last drink. And in Les Marronniers she had given them the slip. Once she was free, she’d called me from a café on the Boulevard de Courcelles.

  She lit a cigarette and began to cough. She lay her hand on mine just as I’d seen her do with Van Bever in the café on the Rue Cujas. And she kept coughing, that terrible cough she had.

  I took her cigarette and put it out in the ashtray. She said:

  ‘We both have to leave Paris…. Is that all right with you?’

  Of course it was all right.

  ‘Where would you like to go?’ I asked.

  ‘Anywhere.’

  The Gare de Lyon was quite close. We only had to walk down the quai to the Jardin des Plantes and cross the Seine. We’d both touched bottom, and now the time had come to give the mud a kick that would bring us to the surface again. Back at Les Marronniers, Cartaud was probably becoming concerned about Jacqueline’s absence. Van Bever might still be in Dieppe or Forges.

  ‘What about Gérard? Aren’t we going to wait for him?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head and her features began to crumple up. She was about to dissolve into tears. I realized that the reason she wanted to go away with me was so that she could put an end to an episode of her life. And me too: I was leaving behind me all the gray, uncertain years I had lived up to then.

  I wanted to tell her again: ‘Maybe we should wait for Gérard.’ I said nothing. A silhouette in a herringbone overcoat would remain frozen forever in the winter of that year. A few words would come back to me: the neutral five. And also a brown-haired man in a gray suit, with whom I’d had only the most fleeting encounter, and never learned whether he was a dentist or not. And the faces, dimmer and dimmer, of my parents.

  I reached into my raincoat pocket for the key to the apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann that she had given me, and I set it on the table.

  ‘What shall we do with this?’

  ‘We’ll keep it as a souvenir.’

  No one was left at the bar. I could hear the fluorescent lights crackling in the silence around us. The light they put out contrasted with the black of the terrace windows. It was too bright, like a promise of springs and summers to come.

  “We should go south….’

  It gave me pleasure to say the word south. That night, in that deserted café, under the fluorescent lights, life did not yet have any weight at all, and it was so easy to run…. Past midnight. The manager came to our table to tell us that the Café Dante was closing.

  Chapter 10

  In the suitcase we found two thin bundles of banknotes, a pair of gloves, books on dental surgery, and a stapler. Jacqueline seemed disappointed to see how thin the bundles were.

  We decided to pass through London before heading south to Majorca. We left the suitcase at the checkroom in the Gare du Nord.

  We had to wait more than an hour in the buffet for our train. I bought an envelope and a stamp, and I mailed the claim stub to Cartaud at 160 Boulevard Haussmann. I added a note promising to repay the money in the very near future.

  Chapter 11

  In London that spring only married adults could get a room in a hotel. We ended up in a sort of family boardinghouse in Bloomsbury whose landlady pretended to believe we were brother and sister. She gave us a room that was meant to serve as a smoking room or a library, furnished with three couches and a bookshelf. We could only stay five days, and we had to pay in advance.

  After that, by appearing at the front desk one after the other as if we weren’t acquainted, we managed to get two rooms in the Cumberland, whose massive façade stood over Marble Arch. But there, too, we left after three days, once they had caught on to the deception.

  We really didn’t know where we would sleep. After Marble Arch we walked straight ahead, along Hyde Park, and turned onto Sussex Gardens, an avenue that climbed toward Paddington Station. One little hotel followed another along the left-hand sidewalk. We picked one a
t random, and this time they didn’t even ask to see our papers.

  Chapter 12

  Doubt always overtook us at the same time: at night, on the way back to the hotel, as we thought of returning to the room where we were living like fugitives, only as long as the owner allowed us to stay.

  We walked up and down Sussex Gardens before we crossed the threshold of the hotel. Neither of us had any desire to go back to Paris. From now on the Quai de la Tournelle and the Latin Quarter were closed to us. Paris is a big city, of course, and we could have moved to another neighborhood where there would be no danger of running into Gérard Van Bever or Cartaud. But it was better not to look back.

  How much time went by before we made the acquaintance of Linda, Peter Rachman, and Michael Savoundra? Maybe two weeks. Two endless weeks of rain. We went to the movies as an escape from our room and its mildew-flecked wallpaper. Then we took a walk, always along Oxford Street. We came to Bloomsbury, to the street of the boardinghouse where we had spent our first night in London. And once again we walked the length of Oxford Street, in the opposite direction.

  We were trying to put off the moment when we would return to the hotel. We couldn’t go on walking in this rain. We could always see another movie or go into a department store or a café. But then we would only have to give up and turn back toward Sussex Gardens.

  Late one afternoon, when we had ventured farther along to the other bank of the Thames, I felt myself being overcome by panic. It was rush hour: a stream of suburbanites was crossing Waterloo Bridge in the direction of the station. We were walking across the bridge in the opposite direction, and I was afraid we would be caught up in the oncoming current. But we managed to free ourselves. We sat down on a bench in Trafalgar Square. We hadn’t spoken a single word as we walked.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Jacqueline asked me. ‘You’re so pale….’

  She was smiling at me. I could see that she was struggling to keep calm. The thought of walking back to the hotel through the crowds on Oxford Street was too much to bear. I didn’t dare ask if she was feeling as anxious as I was. I said:

  ‘Don’t you think this city is too big?’

  I tried to smile as well. She was looking at me with a frown.

  This city is too big, and we don’t know anyone….’

  My voice was desperate. I couldn’t get another word out.

  She had lit a cigarette. She was wearing her light leather jacket and coughing from time to time, as she used to do in Paris. I missed the Quai de la Tournelle, the Boulevard Haussmann, and the Gare Saint-Lazare. ‘It was easier in Paris….’

  But I had spoken so softly that I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. She was absorbed in her thoughts. She had forgotten I was there. In front of us, a red telephone booth, from which a woman had just emerged.

  It’s too bad there’s no one we can call…,’ I said.

  She turned to me and put her hand on my arm. She had overcome the despair she must have been feeling a moment before, as we were walking along the Strand toward Trafalgar Square.

  ‘All we need is some money to get to Majorca….’

  She had been fixated on that idea from the moment I met her, when I saw the address on the envelope.

  ‘In Majorca things will be easier for us. You’ll be able to write your books….’

  One day I had let slip that I hoped to write books someday, but we had never talked about it again. Maybe she mentioned it now as a way of reassuring me. She really was a much steadier person than I was.

  All the same, I wondered how she was planning to find the money. She didn’t flinch:

  ‘It’s only in big cities that you can find money…. Imagine if we were stuck in some backwater out in the middle of nowhere…’

  Yes, she was right. Suddenly Trafalgar Square looked much friendlier to me. I was watching the water flow from the fountains, and that helped calmed me. We were not condemned to stay in this city and drown in the crowds on Oxford Street. We had a very simple goal: to find some money and go to Majorca. It was like Van Bever’s martingale. With all the streets and intersections around us our chances only increased, and we would surely bring about a happy coincidence in the end.

  From then on we avoided Oxford Street and the center of town, and we always walked west toward Holland Park and the Kensington neighborhood.

  One afternoon, at the Holland Park underground station, we had our pictures taken in a Photomat. We posed with our faces close together. I kept the pictures as a souvenir. Jacqueline’s face is in the foreground, and mine, slightly set back, is cut off by the edge of the photo so that my left ear can’t be seen. After the flash we couldn’t stop laughing, and she wanted to stay on my knees in the booth. Then we followed the avenue alongside Holland Park, past the big white houses with their porticoes. The sun was shining for the first time since our arrival in London, and as I remember, the weather was always bright and warm from that day onward, as if summer had come early.

  Chapter 13

  At lunchtime, in a café on Notting Hill Gate, we made the acquaintance of a woman named Linda Jacobsen. She spoke to us first. A dark-haired girl, our age, long hair, high cheekbones and slightly slanted blue eyes.

  She asked what region of France we were from. She spoke slowly, as if she were hesitating over every word, so it was easy to have a conversation with her in English. She seemed surprised that we were living in one of those seedy Sussex Gardens hotels. But we explained that we had no other choice because we were both underage.

  The next day we found her in the same place again, and she came to sit down at our table. She asked if we would be staying long in London. To my great surprise, Jacqueline told her we planned to stay for several months and even to look for work here.

  ‘But in that case you can’t go on living in that hotel….’

  Every night we longed to move out because of the smell that hung in the room, a sickly sweet smell that might have come from the drains, from a kitchen, or from the rotting carpet. In the morning we would go for a long walk in Hyde Park to get rid of the smell, which impregnated our clothes. It went away, but during the day it would come back, and I would ask Jacqueline:

  ‘Do you smell it?’

  It was depressing to think that it would be following us for the rest of our lives.

  The worst thing,’ Jacqueline told her in French, ‘is the smell in the hotel….’

  I had to translate for her as best I could. Finally Linda understood. She asked if we had some money. Of the two small bundles in the suitcase, only one was left.

  ‘Not much,’ I said.

  She looked at us both in turn. She smiled. I was always amazed when people were kind to us. Much later, I found the Photomat picture from Holland Park at the bottom of a shoebox full of old letters, and I was struck by the innocence of our faces. We inspired trust in people. And we had no real qualities, except the one that youth gives to everyone for a very brief time, like a vague promise that will never be kept.

  ‘I have a friend who might be able to help you,’ Linda told us. ‘I’ll introduce you to him tomorrow.’

  They often arranged to meet in this café. She lived nearby, and he, her friend, had an office a little way up the street on Westbourne Grove, the avenue with the two movie theaters Jacqueline and I often went to. We always saw the last showing of the evening, as a way of delaying our return to the hotel, and it scarcely mattered to us that we saw the same films every night.

  Chapter 14

  The next day, about noon, we were with Linda when Peter Rachman came into the café. He sat down at our table without even saying hello. He was smoking a cigar and dropping the ash onto the lapels of his jacket.

  I was surprised at his appearance: he seemed old to me, but he was only in his forties. He was of average height, quite fat, round face, bald in front and on top, and he wore tortoise-shell glasses. His childlike hands contrasted with his substantial build.

  Linda explained our situation to him, but she spoke too quickly
for me to understand. He kept his little creased eyes on Jacqueline. From time to time he puffed nervously on his cigar and blew the smoke into Linda’s face.

  She stopped talking and he smiled at us, at Jacqueline and me. But his eyes were still cold. He asked me the name of our hotel on Sussex Gardens. I told him: the Radnor. He burst out in a brief laugh.

  ‘Don’t pay the bill. … I own the place…. Tell the concierge I said there would be no charge for you….’

  He turned to Jacqueline.

  ‘Is it possible that such a pretty woman could be living in the Radnor?’

  He had tried to sound suave and worldly, and it made him burst out laughing.

  ‘You’re in the hotel business?’

  He didn’t answer my question. Again he blew the smoke from his cigar into Linda’s face. He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Don’t worry…,’ he said in English.

  He repeated these words several times, speaking to himself. He got up to make a telephone call. Linda sensed that we were a little confused, and she tried to explain some things for us. This Peter Rachman was in the business of buying and reselling apartment houses. Maybe it was too great a stretch to call them ‘apartment houses’; they were only decrepit old tenements, scarcely more than hovels, most of them in this neighborhood, as well as in Bayswater and Notting Hill. She didn’t understand his business very well. But despite his brutish appearance, he was – she wanted us to know from the start – really a lovely fellow.

  Rachman’s Jaguar was parked a few steps down the street. Linda got into the front seat. She turned to us:

  ‘You can come and stay with me while you wait for Peter to find you another place….’

  He started up the car and followed along Kensington Gardens. Then he turned onto Sussex Gardens. He stopped in front of the Hotel Radnor.

  ‘Go pack your bags,’ he told us. ‘And remember, don’t pay the bill…’