So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood

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DURING A DIFFERENT AUTUMN TO THAT SUNDAY at Le Tremblay, an autumn equally long ago, Daragane had received a letter at square du Graisivaudan. He was walking past the concierge’s door just as she was about to distribute the post.

“I suppose you’re Jean Daragane.” And she handed him a letter that had his name written in blue ink on the envelope. He had never received any post at this address. He did not recognise the handwriting, a very large handwriting that covered the entire envelope: Jean Daragane, 8 square du Graisivaudan, Paris. There was not enough space for the number of the arrondissement. On the back of the envelope, a name and an address: A. Astrand, 18 rue Alfred-Dehodencq, Paris.

For a few seconds, this name did not register with him at all. Was it because of the simple initial “A” that concealed the first name? Later on, he reckoned that he had had a premonition because he hesitated to open the letter. He walked to the boundary between Neuilly and Levallois, through that area where, in two or three years’ time, the garages and humble houses would be torn down to build the ring road. ASTRAND. How could he not have realised, in that very instant, whom it referred to?

He turned around and walked into the café beneath one of the blocks of flats. He sat down, took the letter out of his pocket, asked for an orange juice, and, if possible, a knife. He opened the letter with the knife, because he feared that if he used his hands he might tear the address on the back of the envelope. All it contained were three passport photos. In all three, he recognised himself as a child. He remembered the afternoon on which they had been taken, in a shop, the other side of the pont Saint-Michel, opposite the Palais de Justice. Since then, he had often walked past this shop, exactly as it was in the old days.

He needed to find these passport photos to compare them with the enlargement that was part of Ottolini’s “file”. In the suitcase in which he had crammed letters and papers that were at least forty years old and to which he had, fortunately, lost the key? No point. They were certainly the same photographs. “Unidentified child. Search and arrest Astrand, Annie. Customs post Ventimiglia. Monday 21 July 1952.” They must have arrested and searched her at the very moment she was preparing to cross the frontier.

She had read his novel, Le Noir de l’été and she had recognised an episode from that particular summer. Otherwise, why would she have written to him after fifteen years? But how could she have known his temporary address? Especially since he rarely slept at square du Graisivaudan. He spent the greater part of his time in a room in rue Coustou and in the place Blanche neighbourhood.

He had written this book only in the hope that she might get in touch with him. Writing a book, for him, was also a way of beaming a searchlight or sending out coded signals to certain people with whom he had lost touch. It was enough to scatter their names at random through the pages and wait until they finally produced news of themselves. But in the case of Annie Astrand, he had not mentioned her name and he had endeavoured to cover his tracks. She would not be able to recognise herself in any of his characters. He had never understood why anyone should want to put someone who had mattered to them into a novel. Once that person had drifted into a novel in much the same way as one might walk through a mirror, he escaped from you forever. He had never existed in real life. He had been reduced to nothingness. . You needed to go about it in a more subtle way. For example, in Le Noir de l’été, the only page in the book that might attract Annie Astrand’s attention was the scene in which the woman and the child walk into the shop with the instant-photo Photomaton booth, on the boulevard du Palais. He does not understand why she pushes him into the booth. She tells him to stare into the screen and not to move his head. She draws the black curtain. He is sitting on the stool. A flash blinds him and he closes his eyes. She draws the black curtain again, and he leaves the booth. They wait for the photos to fall from the slot. And he has to do it all over again because his eyes are shut in the photos. Afterwards, she had taken him to have a grenadine at the nearby café. That was what had happened. He had described the scene precisely and he knew that this passage did not fit with the rest of the novel. It was a fragment of reality that he had smuggled in, one of those private messages that people put in small ads in newspapers and that can only be deciphered by one person.