The Black Notebook (7 page)

“Was your class interesting?”

I had never been to university, and I imagined him in a classroom like that in a primary school, lifting his desktop to take out his grammar text and notebook and dipping his nib in the inkwell.

We walked across the empty lot, avoiding the puddles. His camel coat and black briefcase only reinforced my opinion: he couldn't be a student. He looked like someone on his way to a business appointment in a hotel lobby in Geneva. I'd thought we would go as usual to the café on Place Monge, but we took the opposite direction, toward the Jardin des Plantes.

“You don't mind if we have a quiet chat while we walk, do you?”

He spoke in a casual, friendly tone, but I could sense some awkwardness, as if he were searching for the right words and expected to find himself on foreign ground where he would not meet anyone he knew. And, in fact, Rue Cuvier stretched before us, deserted and silent all the way to the Seine.

“I wanted to warn you . . .”

He had said these words with great seriousness. Then, nothing. Perhaps, at the last minute, he had lost his nerve.

“Warn me about what?”

I had asked the question too bluntly. While I kept a “low profile,” as Paul Chastagnier said, I had never followed others' advice. Never. And every time they were surprised—and disappointed—because I had listened so attentively, wide-eyed like a good pupil or pleasant young man. We walked past the low houses that bordered the Jardin des Plantes. I think it was the part of the botanical gardens that contained the zoo. The street was dimly lit, and at the end of the darkness and silence I was afraid we would hear the growls of roaming beasts.

“I should have said something earlier . . . It's about Dannie . . .”

I turned to look at him, but he was resolutely facing forward. I wondered if he wasn't deliberately avoiding my eyes.

“I met Dannie at the Cité Universitaire . . . She was looking for someone to lend her a room, and even a student ID . . .”

He spoke slowly, as if trying with every word to inject as much clarity as possible into a very muddled topic.

“I always suspected someone had told her to look me up . . . Otherwise she never would have thought of coming to the Cité Universitaire . . .”

I, too, had often wondered how a girl like Dannie would know about the Cité. I had asked her one evening when we'd gone to the post office. “You know,” she had answered, “I did come to Paris to study.” Yes, but study what?

“Through a friend in the Moroccan Pavilion, I was able to get her a student ID and residence card . . . in my wife's name . . .”

Why in his wife's name? He had stopped walking.

“She was afraid to use her own ID . . . When I had to leave the Cité Universitaire, she didn't want to stay there. I introduced her to the others at the hotel in Montparnasse . . . I think they helped her get false papers . . .”

He gripped my arm and pulled me to the opposite sidewalk. I was surprised by his abrupt desire to cross the street. We had stopped in front of a small building, and perhaps he was afraid someone might overhear us through the windows. On the other side, no such danger. We skirted the gates of the Central Wine Market, bathed in shadow and even more deserted and silent than the street.

“And why,” I asked, “did she need false papers?”

It felt like a dream. This often happened in that period of my life, especially after nightfall. Exhaustion? Or that strange, overpowering sensation of déjà vu, also due to lack of sleep? Everything gets jumbled in your mind, past, present, and future; everything is superimposed. And still today, Rue Cuvier strikes me as detached from Paris, in some unknown provincial town, and I can hardly believe that the man walking next to me ever really existed. I still hear my voice in a distant echo: “Why did she need false papers?”

“But her name really
is
Dannie, isn't it?” I asked Aghamouri in a falsely casual tone, dreading what he might reveal.

“Yes, probably,” he said curtly. “On her new ID card, I'm not sure. It's not really important . . . On the card I gave her at the Cité Universitaire, she has my wife's name, Michèle Aghamouri.”

I asked him a question that I regretted the moment I'd said it:

“And what about your wife—does she know about all this?”

“No.”

He again became what he had been a few moments earlier, the person I still remember very clearly: a worried man, eternally on the alert.

“This stays between us, all right?”

“You know,” I said to him, “I've known how to keep my mouth shut since I was little.”

The solemn tone in which I'd spoken those words surprised even me.

“She's done something pretty serious and they might hold her accountable,” he blurted out. “That's why she wanted new ID papers.”

“Pretty serious? Like what?”

“Ask her yourself. The problem is, if you do ask her, she'll know you heard it from me . . .”

A gate was half-open, allowing access to the Central Wine Market, and Aghamouri had stopped in front of it.

“We can cut through here,” he said. “I know a café on Rue Jussieu. Aren't you tired of walking?”

I passed through the gateway behind him and entered a large courtyard surrounded by half-demolished buildings, like the ones in the former leather exchange. And the same semidarkness as over the empty lot where I had waited not long before . . . Up ahead, a streetlamp shed white light on the still-intact warehouses, whose walls bore painted signs like the ones I had noted in the ruins of the leather exchange.

I turned toward Aghamouri.

“May I?”

I pulled the black notebook from my jacket pocket, and today I again read the notes I rapidly took down that evening as we walked toward Rue Jussieu:

Marie Brizard & Roger

Butte de la Gironde

Fine Wines of Algeria

La Loire Warehouses

Libaud, Margerand & Blonde

Brandies and Liqueurs. La Roseraie Cellars . . .

“Do you often do this?” Aghamouri asked.

He seemed disappointed, as if he feared that everything he had just confided didn't really interest me and my mind was on something else. But there's nothing I can do about it: I was as susceptible back then as I am now to people and things that are about to disappear. We came to a modern building with a brightly lit vestibule, which bore on its façade the inscription
FACULTY OF SCIENCES.

We walked through the vestibule and then through another patch of waste ground up to Rue Jussieu.

“Here it is,” said Aghamouri.

And he pointed out a café across the street, next to the Lutèce Theater. People were clustered on the sidewalk, waiting for the show to begin.

We sat in a corner near the bar. Facing us, on the opposite side of the room, stood a row of tables with a few diners.

Now it was my turn to take the initiative and get him to talk. Otherwise he might start having second thoughts.

“Before, you said Dannie had done something serious . . . I'd really like to know more.”

He paused for a moment.

“She's liable to find herself in deep trouble, of a legal nature . . .”

He was searching for the right words—precise, professional terms, the words of a lawyer or policeman.

“She's fairly safe for now . . . But they could find out she was involved in an ugly incident . . .”

“What kind of ugly incident?”

“You'll have to ask her that yourself.”

There was a moment of silence between us. An awkward moment. I heard them ringing up the curtain in the theater next door, announcing the start of the play. Lord, how I would have loved to be in the auditorium with her that evening, among the spectators, and for her not to be involved in an ugly incident . . . I couldn't understand Aghamouri's resistance to telling me what that ugly incident was.

“My sense is, you and Dannie are fairly intimate,” I said. He gave me an embarrassed look. “I saw you together one evening, very late, at the 66 . . .”

He didn't seem to know what the 66 was. I explained that it was a café toward the upper end of Boulevard Saint-Michel, near the Luxembourg station.

“It's possible . . . We used to go there when we still lived at the Cité Universitaire.”

He smiled, as if trying to steer the conversation onto more neutral territory, but I wanted him to keep to the essentials. After all, it was he who had asked to meet. I was carrying his letter, its envelope bearing my name and address, 28 Rue de l'Aude. I had slipped it between the pages of my black notebook. Moreover, I still have it; I reread it earlier today, before faithfully copying down its contents on a sheet of the Clairefontaine stationery I've been using lately.

“Don't you think you should let your wife know Dannie is carrying identity papers in her name . . . ?”

I could feel him “crack,” and never had that slang term seemed so appropriate. When I think back to that moment, I can even see a network of tiny fissures on the skin of his face. He seemed so worried that I felt like reassuring him. No, none of it was important.

“If you could get back that card I gave her with my wife's name, it would be a huge help . . .”

He knew I wasn't a bad sort. After all, the two or three times we had seen each other, in the evening after his courses at Censier, we would talk about literature. He was fairly knowledgeable about Baudelaire, and had asked to read my notes about Jeanne Duval.

“Anyway,” he said, “the others made her false papers, so she doesn't need that card anymore . . . But be sure not to mention I told you about it . . .”

He looked so distressed that I resolved to do him this favor, without really knowing how. I had qualms about simply rummaging through Dannie's handbag. At first, when I would go with her to the post office, she used to hand the clerk behind the window some kind of identity card. Was it in the name of Michèle Aghamouri? Was that the name on the false papers she had gotten from the gang at the Unic Hôtel? And which of them, precisely, had done her that favor? Paul Chastagnier? Duwelz? Gérard Marciano? Personally, my money was on Georges, the man with the moon face and ice water in his veins, who was older than the others and inspired fear in them—the one about whom Paul Chastagnier had said, in response to a question of mine: “He's no altar boy, you know . . .”

“I gather you and your wife have an apartment near the Maison de la Radio . . .”

I was afraid he would think me indiscreet. But instead, he smiled, and I sensed he was relieved to have it out in the open.

“Yes, that's right . . . a tiny little place . . . We'd like to have you over sometime, my wife and I . . . but on condition that you forget I know Dannie, the Unic Hôtel, and the others while we're there . . .”

He had said “there” as if it were some faraway land, a neutral country where one was safe from harm.

“So basically,” I said, “you only have to cross the Seine to forget all about what you've left behind.”

“Do you really think so?”

I could see he wanted some kind of comfort. I believe he trusted me . . . Whenever we were alone, or walking from Place Monge to Montparnasse, we talked about literature. It wasn't as if he could do that with the others, the ones from the Unic Hôtel. I had a hard time imagining Paul Chastagnier, or Duwelz, or Georges taking an interest in the fate of Jeanne Duval. Gérard Marciano, perhaps? One day, he had confided to me that he wanted to try being a painter, and that he knew an “artists' joint” on Rue Delambre, the Rosebud. Many years later, in the file that Langlais handed over to me, there was a police report on Marciano with two mug shots, front and profile, and the Rosebud was mentioned as one of his hangouts.

Aghamouri raised his eyes to me.

“Unfortunately, I don't think it's enough just to cross the Seine . . .”

Once again he had that timid smile that threatened to fade at any moment.

“Dannie isn't the only one . . . There's me, too, Jean—I've got myself in a hell of a mess . . .”

It was the first time he called me by my given name, and I was touched. I kept quiet so that he'd go on talking. I was worried that a single word might cut short any further confidences.

“I'm afraid to go home to Morocco . . . It would be the same as Paris . . . Once you've caught a finger in the works, it's very hard to pull your hand out.”

What “works” was he talking about? In the gentlest possible voice, almost a whisper, I asked him a question, a shot in the dark:

“When you were living at the Cité Universitaire, didn't you feel safe?”

He knit his brow, giving his face a studious look—no doubt the face he made at the Censier branch to reassure himself he was just a simple student.

“You know, Jean, there was a strange atmosphere in that place, the Cité, the Moroccan Pavilion . . . Frequent police checks . . . They wanted to keep an eye on the residents for political reasons. Certain students were opposed to the Moroccan government . . . and Morocco asked France to put them under surveillance . . . That's all . . .”

He seemed relieved to confide in me. Even a bit breathless. That's all. After that preamble, it was surely easier for him to cut to the chase.

“So you might say my position was rather delicate . . . I was caught between the two . . . I hung out with people on both sides . . . You could even say I was playing both sides . . . But it's much more complicated than that . . . In the end, you can never play both sides.”

He must have been right, since he confessed it with such gravity . . . Curiously, that sentence has lodged in my memory. Over the following years, when I was alone in the street, preferably at night and in certain areas in the west of Paris—one evening near the Maison de la Radio, in fact—I heard Aghamouri's voice saying to me from afar: “In the end, you can never play both sides.”