The Black Notebook (11 page)

Now that I've been writing these pages, I do think that there is, in fact, a way to combat oblivion: go into certain areas of Paris where you haven't set foot in thirty or forty years and spend the afternoon, as if on a stakeout. Perhaps the women and men you've been wondering about might suddenly appear around a street corner, or along a path in the park, or will emerge from one of the buildings that border those empty mews labeled “Square” or “Villa.” These people lead their clandestine lives, and this is possible only in quiet areas, far removed from the center of town. Still, the few times I thought I recognized Dannie, it was always in a crowd. One evening at the Gare de Lyon, when I was about to take a train, in the hullabaloo of people leaving on holiday. One late Saturday afternoon, at the intersection of the boulevard and the Chaussée d'Antin, amid the throngs crushing into the large department stores. But each time I was mistaken.

One winter morning, some twenty years ago, I had been summoned to the courthouse in the thirteenth arrondissement, and at around eleven o'clock, after I left court, I found myself on the sidewalk of Place d'Italie. I had not been back to that square since the spring of 1964, a time when I frequented the area. I realized I didn't have a penny in my pocket for a cab or the metro fare home. I found an ATM in a small side street behind the district town hall, but after I had entered my PIN code, a slip of paper came out in lieu of cash. It read: “We're sorry. You have insufficient credit.” Again I entered my code, and the same slip of paper came out with the same message: “We're sorry. You have insufficient credit.” I skirted the town hall and once again was on the sidewalk of Place d'Italie.

Fate wanted to keep me here and was not to be crossed. Maybe I would never manage to leave this district, since my credit was insufficient. I felt lighthearted because of the sun and the blue January sky. The skyscrapers hadn't existed in 1964, but they gradually dissolved in the limpid air to make way for the Clair de Lune café and the squat buildings of Boulevard de la Gare. I would slip into a parallel time where no one could ever reach me.

The paulownias with their mauve flowers in Place d'Italie . . . I repeated that phrase to myself, and I admit that it brought tears to my eyes—or was it the winter cold? In short, I had returned to my point of departure, and if ATMs had existed in 1964, I would have received the same slip of paper: insufficient credit. Back then, I had no credit, no legitimacy. No family or defined social status. I floated on the Paris air.

I walked toward the former site of the Clair de Lune. People used to sit for hours at the tables in back, near the bandstand, not ordering anything. I was circling Place d'Italie. Perhaps I should take a room in a small hotel, like the Coypel, if it still existed, or another whose name I'd forgotten near Les Gobelins. I arrived at the corner of Avenue de la Soeur-Rosalie and again walked toward the town hall, wondering how long I would keep turning around the square, as if it were a magnetic field holding me in place. I stopped in front of a café. A middle-aged man was seated at a table behind the window, watching me. And I, too, couldn't take my eyes off him. His face reminded me of someone. Regular features. Gray—or white—hair in a long brush cut. He waved to me. He wanted me to come join him in the café.

He stood at my approach and held out his hand.

“Langlais. Can you place me now?”

I had a moment's hesitation. It was probably his military stiffness and the “can you place me now” that helped me identify him. And besides, one never forgets the faces of people one meets at a stressful time in one's life.

“Quai de Gesvres.”

He looked surprised that I should say that.

“You have a good memory.”

He sat back down and motioned for me to take the seat opposite him.

“I've been keeping an eye on you from a distance all this time,” he said. “I even read your last book, the one about that woman . . . Jeanne Duval . . .”

I didn't quite know what to answer. I repeated:

“You've been keeping an eye on me?”

He smiled, and I recalled that back then he had shown me some kindness.

“Yes . . . Keeping an eye . . . It was sort of my job . . .”

He looked at me, knitting his brow, as he had the previous century in his office on the Quai de Gesvres. Apart from his gray brush cut, he had not changed much. It wasn't very warm in that part of the café near the windows, and he had kept on a gabardine coat that might have dated from the time of my interrogation.

“I don't suppose you live in this neighborhood . . . or I would have seen you before . . .”

“No, I don't live in the neighborhood,” I said. “And I haven't been back here in ages . . . Since the time of Quai de Gesvres . . .”

“Will you have something to drink?”

The waiter was standing at our table. I nearly ordered a Cointreau, in memory of Dannie, but I had no money on me and felt embarrassed at being treated.

“Thanks, I'm fine,” I stammered.

“Oh, go on . . . Order something.”

“An espresso.”

“Same for me,” said Langlais.

There was a moment of silence. It was my turn to break the ice:

“Do
you
live in the neighborhood?”

“Yes—always have.”

“I did, too, when I was younger. I knew this area well . . . Do you remember the Clair de Lune?”

“Of course! But what were you doing at the Clair de Lune?”

His tone was the same as at my interrogation, back then. He smiled.

“You're under no obligation to answer. We're not in my office anymore.”

Through the café window, I could see the part of Place d'Italie that hadn't changed under the sun and blue sky. I felt as if he had questioned me only the day before. I smiled back.

“And where should we pick up the interrogation?” I asked.

He, too, was feeling the same thing, I was sure of it. Time had been erased. Not a day had gone by between the Quai de Gesvres and Place d'Italie.

“It's funny,” he said. “There were several times when I tried to get in touch with you . . . I even called your publisher once, but they wouldn't give out your address.”

He leaned toward me and squinted.

“Mind you, I could have found your address if I wanted . . . It was my job . . .”

He again had the same gruff tone as on the Quai de Gesvres. I couldn't tell whether he was joking.

“Only, I didn't want to bother you . . . or give you cause for alarm.”

He nodded, looking like he wanted to add something. I waited with folded arms. It was as if our roles had reversed and
I
was the one behind the desk, about to begin the interrogation.

“So, here's the thing . . . When I retired, I took two or three case files with me, as souvenirs . . . and among them was the file on the people who were the reason why we summoned you to Quai de Gesvres . . .”

He spoke sheepishly, almost shyly, as if he had just made a compromising admission that might shock me.

“If you're still interested . . .”

I thought I must be dreaming. A man had just sat down at a table near the window in back, and was punching in a number on his mobile phone. Seeing that object confirmed that it was no dream and that the two of us were here, in the present, in the real world.

“Of course I'm interested,” I said.

“That's why I wanted your address . . . I was going to mail it all to you.”

“Odd characters,” I said. “I've been thinking about them a lot recently . . .”

I wanted to tell him why this case file, which was nearly half a century old, still interested me. You have lived through a short period of your life—day by day, without asking any questions—under strange circumstances, among people who were equally strange. And it's only much later that you can finally understand what you lived through and who those people really were, on condition that someone finally gives you the key to decipher a coded language. Most people aren't in that situation: their memories are simple, straightforward, self-sufficient, and they don't need dozens and dozens of years to clarify them.

“I understand,” he said, as if he had read my thoughts. “This file will be a little like a time bomb for you.”

He looked over the bill. I was truly embarrassed not to be able to offer to pay. But I didn't dare confess to him that, that morning, my credit was insufficient.

Outside, on the sidewalk around the square, we were still and silent, Langlais and I. Apparently he didn't want to part company right away.

“I could just hand you the file . . . No need to mail it . . . I live right nearby . . .”

“That would be very kind of you,” I said.

We circled Place d'Italie, and he pointed to a high-rise on the corner of Avenue de Choisy.

“That's where the Clair de Lune used to be,” he said, indicating the ground floor. “My father took me there a lot . . . He knew the manageress . . .”

We started up Avenue de Choisy.

“I live a bit further down . . . Don't worry, I won't make you walk for miles.”

We arrived at Square de Choisy. I had a clear recollection of this public garden, which looked more like a park; of the large redbrick building called the Institut Dentaire, and of the girls' school way in back. On the other side of the avenue, after the high-rises, were modest houses of the type I remembered. But how much longer would they be there? Langlais had stopped in front of a small building on the corner of a blind alley, with a Chinese restaurant on the ground floor.

“I won't ask you to come up . . . I'd be too ashamed . . . It's a pigsty up there . . . I'll just be a moment . . .”

Alone on the sidewalk, I pondered the leafless trees in Square de Choisy and, farther on, the dark red mass of the Institut Dentaire. That building had always struck me as an anomaly in this park. My memories of Square de Choisy were not memories of winter, but of spring or summer, when the foliage on the trees contrasted with the dark red of the institute.

“What were you daydreaming about?”

I hadn't heard him come up. In his hand was a yellow plastic folder. He held it out to me.

“Here . . . Your case file . . . It's not very thick, but it might interest you.”

We were both reluctant to part company. I would have liked to invite him to lunch.

“Please don't take it the wrong way that I didn't ask you up . . . It's a tiny apartment that used to belong to my parents . . . Its only plus is the view of all those trees . . .”

He gestured toward the entrance of Square de Choisy.

“We were talking about the Clair de Lune before . . . The manageress was murdered over there, in the park. You see . . . That redbrick building . . . the institute . . .”

He was lost in a painful memory.

“They dragged her over to it . . . They shoved her against the wall and shot her in the back . . . And afterward, they realized they'd made a mistake.”

Had he witnessed the scene from his window?

“It happened after the liberation of Paris . . . A whole bunch of them had commandeered the building . . . bogus Resistance men . . . Captain Bernard and Captain Manu . . . and a lieutenant whose name I've forgotten . . .”

I hadn't known these details when I used to walk through Square de Choisy, years ago, to wait for a childhood friend to come out of the girls' school.

“One shouldn't stir up the past too much. I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing by giving you that file . . . Did you ever see the girl again? The one with all the aliases?”

At first I didn't understand whom he meant.

“The reason why we questioned you. What did you call her?”

“Dannie.”

“Her real name was Dominique Roger. But she had other names, too.”

Dominique Roger. Perhaps it was under that name that she went to collect her mail at the post office. I had never seen the name on the envelopes. She jammed the letters into her coat pocket immediately after reading them.

“Maybe you knew her as Mireille Sampierry?” asked Langlais.

“No.”

He spread open his arms and looked at me with eyes full of compassion.

“Do you think she's still alive?” I asked him.

“Do you really want to know?”

I had never put the question to myself so plainly. If I were being honest, the answer would be, No. Not really.

“What's the point?” he said. “You can't force things. Maybe someday you'll run into her in the street.
We
found each other, you and I . . .”

I had opened the yellow plastic folder. At a glance, it seemed to contain about ten sheets.

“You'd be better off reading that with a clear head . . . If you have any questions, give me a call.”

He fished in his inside jacket pocket and handed me a tiny calling card bearing the words: Langlais, 159 Avenue de Choisy, and a telephone number.

After taking a few steps, I turned around. He hadn't gone back inside. He remained standing there, on the sidewalk, watching me from a distance. He would surely keep his eyes on me until I disappeared at the end of the avenue. Back when he practiced his profession, he must have gone on many stakeouts on winter days just like this one, or at night, his hands thrust into the pockets of his gabardine coat.

 

 

“One shouldn't stir up the past,” Langlais had said as we were parting company, but that winter morning I still had a long walk ahead of me before reaching home at the far end of Paris. Was it really by chance that I'd found myself in Place d'Italie after more than twenty years and that the ATM had spat out a slip of paper saying, “We're sorry. You have insufficient credit”? What was there to be sorry about? I was happy that morning, lighthearted. Nothing in my pockets. And that long, steady walk, with occasional rest stops on public benches . . . My only regret was that I didn't have my black notebook. I had made a list of the public benches of Paris over the course of various walks: north-south, east-west—those benches that, each time, marked a pause where one could catch one's breath and daydream. I no longer saw a very clear distinction between past and present. I had reached Les Gobelins. Since my youth—and even my childhood—I had done nothing but walk, always in the same streets, to the point where time had become transparent.