Honeymoon (15 page)

"Afraid of what?"

I was automatically wiping the windscreen with a rag I'd found on the petrol pump.

"She's afraid you're going to involve her in an adventure that leads nowhere ... Those are her own words ... She doesn't want to come and see you here ... She told me that she isn't twenty any more ..."

•

The concierge was slowly coming towards us on the pavement, carrying his shopping bag. I introduced Ben Smidane to him. Then Ben got back behind the wheel and signed to me to come and sit beside him. He drove off. There were vestiges of Annette's scent in the car.

"It would be so much simpler if I were to take you back to your wife now.

We were driving very slowly in the direction of the Porte
Dorée.

"Not just yet," I said. "I must stay here for a few more
days."

"Why?"

"To give me time to finish my Memoirs."

"Are you writing your Memoirs?"

I could see that he didn't believe me. And yet I was telling the truth.

"Not really Memoirs," I said. "But almost."

We had reached the square with the fountains and were
driving past the former Colonial Museum.

"I've been making notes over a long period, and now I'm trying to turn them into a book."

"And why couldn't you write your book at home, at the Cité Véron, with Annette?"

"I need a certain atmosphere …"

But I didn't feel like giving him any sort of explanation.

"Listen, Jean ... I'm leaving tomorrow for the Indian Ocean … I'm going to be there for several months ... I won't be able to act as a go-between for you and Annette any longer ... It would be a real shame if you were to make a definite break …"

"You're lucky to be still at an age to go away ... "This had escaped me, just like that. I too would have liked to go away instead of going around in circles on the periphery of this town like someone who can no longer find any emergency exits. I so often have the same dream: I'm on the landing stage, waiting to take off, my water skis on my feet, I'm gripping the rope and waiting for the speedboat to move off and tow me over the water at top speed. But it doesn't move.

He left me outside the hotel.

"Jean, will you promise me to phone her as soon as possible?"

"As soon as they've reconnected the phone in the flat." He didn't know what to make of my reply.

"And you," I said, "I wish you success in your treasure hunt in the Indian Ocean."

•

Back in my room, I once again looked through my notes. In the summer before the war, and sometimes even during the first year of the Occupation, when Ingrid came out of the Lycée Jules-Ferry she took the métro to Église d'Auteuil and went and fetched her father from Doctor Jougan's clinic. It was in a little street between the Avenue de Versailles and the Seine.

He always left the clinic at about half past seven. She used to walk round the block while she was waiting for him. She would come back to the street and see him outside the clinic door, waving to her.

They would walk through this calm, almost rural district, where they could hear the bells of Sainte-Périne or Notre-Dame-d'Auteuil. And they would go and have dinner in a restaurant which I couldn't find the other evening, when I was walking in that vicinity, in the traces of Doctor Teyrsen and his daughter.

I came across the old newspaper cutting dating from the winter when Ingrid had met Rigaud. Ingrid had given it to me the last time I saw her. While we were having dinner she had begun to tell me about all that period, and she'd taken a crocodile wallet out of her bag, and out of the wallet a carefully-folded cutting she had kept with her over all those years. I remember that at that moment she fell silent, and looked at me with a strange expression, as if she wanted to transfer to me a burden that had long weighed on her, or as if she guessed that I too, later, would go looking for her.

It was a tiny paragraph among the other advertisements, the situations wanted and vacant, the property and commercial transactions column:

"Missing: Ingrid Teyrsen, sixteen,
1m60
, oval face, grey eyes, brown sports coat, light blue pullover, beige skirt and hat, black casual shoes. All information to M. Teyrsen,
39
bis
, Boulevard Ornano, Paris."

•

They were living in the flat in the Boulevard Soult, Ingrid and Rigaud, when she decided one afternoon to go back to the eighteenth arrondissement to talk to her father and tell him that she wanted to marry Rigaud as soon as possible.

She never read the papers. She didn't know that the "Missing" advertisement had appeared in an evening paper a few weeks earlier. She was shortly to be told of it by the patron of the hotel.

The snow had melted and it was so mild that you could go out without a coat. But there was still another month to go before the spring. She had felt like walking, and she had gone down the boulevards towards Barbès-Rochechouart, which she had reached at about five. This time there was no curfew.

Ingrid had walked up and down outside the hotel, trying to find the words to justify her disappearance to her father. But they were all jumbled up in her head. She had walked round the block several times. Maybe he wasn't in his room at that hour. If he was still working at the Auteuil clinic, he'd be back for dinner. She'd wait for him in his room. She preferred that.

She went into the café. During the day, the hotel
patron
was behind the counter there. She asked him for the keys to rooms
3
and
5
. He couldn't give them to her. Rooms
3
and
5
were occupied by other people.

He told her that very early one morning, about the middle of December, some policemen had gone up to look for her father in his room, and taken him away, he didn't know where.

•

I was lying on one of the twin beds, with the window wide open on to the Boulevard Soult. Night was falling. The phone rang. I thought for a moment that it was Annette, but how could she have got the number? I lifted the receiver. A metallic voice informed me that the line had been reconnected. Then I dialled our number at the Cité Véron. After two rings, I heard Annette's voice:

"Hallo? … Hallo?"

I said nothing.

"Hallo? ... Is that you, Jean?"

I hung up.

Outside, I walked to the service station. The phone was still ringing in my head, a sound that had certainly not been heard in the flat since Ingrid and Rigaud had left it.

The concierge and the Kabyle in the blue dungarees were sitting on their chairs by the petrol pump and I shook hands with them.

"I've found you a bike," the Kabyle said.

And he pointed to a big red bike leaning against the office window. It didn't have racing handlebars.

"He had a lot of trouble finding it," said the concierge. "Because of the handlebars."

"Thank you very much," I said. "I wanted normal handlebars so as not to have to bend over. That way, I'd see the scenery."

"You won't be back too late?" the concierge asked.

"About midnight."

But I couldn't foresee my state of mind at that hour. No doubt I would feel like making a detour to the
Cité Véron
to see Annette, and – who knows? – staying at home.

•

There was a warm breeze – almost a sirocco – and a few dead leaves that it had blown off the trees were whirling around in the air. The first sign of autumn. I felt fine on the bike. I had been afraid I wouldn't be able to get up the slope in the Boulevard Mortier. But I did. It was easy. I didn't even need to pedal any more. A mysterious force carried me along. No cars. Silence. And even when the street lights became rather too far apart, I could see clearly, because of the full moon.

I hadn't imagined that it would be such a short way. To think that I'd been reluctant to leave the Porte Dorée for the Fieve Hotel, near the Buttes-Chaumont, as if it were the eve of a journey to Mongolia ... They are very close, the ButtesChaumont, and, if I wanted to, in a few minutes I could get to
19
, Rue de l'Atlas, where Ingrid lived with her father when she was a child. I had already reached the La Chapelle station, whose tracks and sheds I could just make out in the shadow below. Another few hundred metres along groups of sleeping blocks, and there was the Porte de Clignancourt. It was so very many years since I had been in this district that coming back to it that night I understood why all I had to do was let myself freewheel on the red bike: I was going back in time.

I started down the Boulevard Ornano and braked a little farther on, at the crossroads. I left the bike against the window of the chemist's. Nothing broke the silence. Except the water flowing along the gutter, murmuring like a fountain. That winter at the beginning of the sixties, when it had been so cold in Paris, we were living in an hotel in the Rue Championnet, whose name I have forgotten. A few steps in the street and I'd be outside it, but I preferred to carry straight on. In January that year Annette had had a favourable reply from the couture house and she had to go there one afternoon to be taken on for a trial period.

The previous day was a Sunday. It had been snowing. We went for a walk in the district. So one of us was beginning to work: we were becoming adult. We went into a café at the Porte de Clignancourt. We chose a table between two banquettes, right at the back, where a little jukebox had been stuck against the wall. That evening we wanted to go to the Omano
43
cinema, but it was better to go to bed early so Annette would be on form the next day.

And now here I was arriving at that cinema, which had been turned into a shop. On the other side of the road, the hotel where Ingrid had lived with her father was no longer an hotel but a block like all the others. The café on the ground floor she had told me about no longer exists. One evening, she too had returned to this district, and for the first time she had felt a sense of emptiness.

Circumstances and settings are of no importance. One day this sense of emptiness and remorse submerges you. Then, like a tide, it ebbs and disappears. But in the end it returns in force, and she couldn't shake it off. Nor could I.

PATRICK MODIANO was born in a suburb of Paris and has published more than seventeen novels, including
Night Rounds
and
A Trace of Malice
, as well as the screenplay
Lacombe Lucien
(with Louis Malle). Another novel,
Missing Person
, is forthcoming from Godine. Mr. Modiano has been awarded a number of literary prizes, including the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie Française, the Prix de Monaco, and France's highest literary honor, the Prix Goncourt.
Honeymoon
is his fourth novel to be translated into English.

BARBARA WRIGHT is the translator of works by Raymond Queneau, Robert Pinget, Nathalie Sarraute, Alfred Jarry, Eugène Ionesco, and many of France
'
s most challenging contemporary writers. She has twice been awarded the Scott-Moncrieff Prize.