Suspended Sentences

SUSPENDED SENTENCES

It was in the days when theater companies toured not just France, Switzerland, and Belgium, but also North Africa. I was ten years old. My mother had gone on the road for a play, and my brother and I were living with friends of hers, in a small town just outside of Paris.

A two-story house with an ivy-covered façade. One of the windows — the kind they call bow windows — extended from the living room. Behind the house, a terraced garden. Hidden at the back of the first terrace, under a clematis, was the grave of Doctor Guillotin. Had he lived in that house? Was it where he’d perfected his device for severing heads? At the very top of the garden were two apple trees and a pear tree.

Small enamel tags hanging from silver chains around the liquor decanters bore names like Izarra, Sherry, Curaçao. Honeysuckle invaded the sloping roof of the well, in the middle of the courtyard just before the garden. The telephone sat on a pedestal table next to one of the living room windows.

A fence protected the front of the house, which stood back slightly from Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. One day they’d repainted the fence after coating it with red lead. Was it really red lead, that sickly orange coating that remains so vivid in my memory? Rue du Docteur-Dordaine looked like a village street, especially at the far end: a nuns’ convent, then a farm where we went to get milk, and beyond that, the chateau. If you walked down the street on the right-hand sidewalk, you went past the post office; across the street, on the left, you could make out behind a fence the nursery of the florist whose son sat next to me in class. A little farther on, on the same side as the post office, the wall of the Jeanne d’Arc school, tucked away behind the leaves of the plane trees.

Opposite our house was a gently sloping avenue. It was bordered on the right by the Protestant temple and by a small wooded area, in the thickets of which we’d found a German soldier’s helmet; on the left, by a long, white house with pediments, which had a large garden and a weeping willow. Farther down, adjacent to the garden, was the Robin des Bois inn.

At the bottom of the avenue, and perpendicular to it, was the main road. Toward the right, the perpetually deserted square in front of the train station, where we learned how to ride bikes. In the other direction, you skirted the town park. On the left-hand sidewalk was a kind of concrete mall that housed, all in a row, the news dealer’s, the movie theater, and the drugstore. The druggist’s son was one of my schoolmates and, one night, his father hanged himself from a rope that he’d attached to the mall balcony. It seems people hang themselves in summer. In the other seasons, they prefer drowning in rivers. That’s what the mayor had told the news dealer.

After that, an empty lot where they held the market every Friday. Sometimes the big top of a traveling circus set up there, or the stalls of a fairground.

You then came to the town hall and the grade crossing. After passing over the latter, you followed the high road that went up to the church square and the monument to the dead. For one Christmas Mass, my brother and I had been choirboys in that church.

There were only women in the house where the two of us lived.

Little Hélène was a brunette of about forty, with a wide forehead and prominent cheekbones. Her very short stature made her seem more like us. She had a slight limp from an accident on the job. She had been a circus rider, then an acrobat, and that gave her a certain cachet in our eyes. The circus — as my brother and I had discovered one afternoon at the Médrano — was a world we wanted to join. She told us she’d stopped plying her trade a long time ago and she showed us a photo album with pictures of her in her rider’s and acrobat’s costumes, and pages from music hall programs that mentioned her name: Hélène Toch. I often asked her to lend me the album so I could look through it in bed, before going to sleep.

They formed a curious trio: she, Annie, and Annie’s mother, Mathilde F. Annie had short blond hair, a straight nose, a soft, delicate face, and light-colored eyes. But there was a toughness about her that clashed with the softness of her face, perhaps due to the old brown leather jacket — a man’s jacket — that she wore over very tight black trousers during the day. In the evening, she often wore a light blue dress cinched at the waist by a wide black belt, and I liked her better that way.

Annie’s mother didn’t look anything like her. Was she really her mother? Annie called her Mathilde. Gray hair in a bun. A hard face. Always dressed in dark clothes. I was scared of her. To me she looked old, and yet she really wasn’t: Annie was twenty-six at the time and her mother about fifty. I remember the cameos she pinned to her blouse. She had a southern accent that I later heard in natives of Nîmes. Annie didn’t sound like that herself; like my brother and me, she had a Paris accent.

Whenever Mathilde talked to me, she called me “blissful idiot.” One morning as I was coming down from my room for breakfast, she’d said as usual:

“Good morning, blissful idiot.”

And I’d said:

“Good morning, Madame.”

And after all these years, I can still hear her answer in her cutting voice with its Nîmes accent:

“‘Madame’? You can call me Mathilde, blissful idiot.”

Little Hélène, beneath her kindness, must have been tough as nails.

I learned later that she’d met Annie when the latter was nineteen. She wielded such influence over Annie and her mother, Mathilde F., that the two women had gone off with her, abandoning Mr. F.

One day, no doubt, the circus Little Hélène worked in had stopped in the provincial backwater where Annie and her mother lived. Annie had sat near the orchestra, and the trumpets announced the arrival of Little Hélène, who was riding a black stallion with a silver caparison. Or else I imagine her way up high, on the trapeze, getting ready for the perilous triple flip.

And Annie goes to see her after the show, in the trailer that Little Hélène shares with the snake lady.

A friend of Annie F.’s often came to the house. Her name was Frede. Today, from my adult perspective, she’s nothing more than a woman who, in the 1950s, owned a nightclub on Rue Ponthieu. At the time, she seemed to be the same age as Annie, but she was actually a bit older, around thirty-five. A short-haired brunette, with a sylphlike body and pale skin. She wore men’s jackets, cinched at the waist, which I took to be riding jackets.

The other day, at a bookstall, I was leafing through an old back issue of La Semaine à Paris from July 1939, which had the movie, theater, music hall, and cabaret listings. I was surprised to come across a tiny photo of Frede: when she was twenty, she was already master of ceremonies in a nightclub. I bought this program, the way you buy a piece of evidence, some tangible proof that it wasn’t all in your head.

It reads:

THE SILHOUETTE

58, Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette

Montmartre, TRI 64-72

FREDE presents

from 10 p.m. til dawn

her all-female Dance-Cabaret

Back from Switzerland

DON MARYO and his famous Orchestra

Guitarist Isidore Langlois

Betty and the Nice Boys

And, fleetingly, I recall the image my brother and I had of Frede whenever we saw her in the garden, as we were returning home from school: a woman who belonged to the world of the circus, like Little Hélène, and whom this world haloed in mystery. We were absolutely certain that Frede operated a circus in Paris, a smaller one than the Médrano, a circus beneath a white canvas big top with red stripes that was called “Carroll’s.” This name was frequently heard in Annie’s and Frede’s mouths: Carroll’s was a nightclub on Rue de Ponthieu, but I imagined the white-and-red big top and the circus animals, of which Frede, with her svelte silhouette and cinched jackets, was the tamer.

Sometimes on Thursdays, when we didn’t have school, she brought her nephew to the house, a boy our age. And the three of us would spend the afternoon playing together. He knew much more than we did about Carroll’s. I remember a sibylline statement he’d made to us, which still resonates with me:

“Annie cried all night long at Carroll’s …”

Perhaps he’d heard that sentence from his aunt, without knowing what it meant. When she didn’t bring him, my brother and I would go meet him at the train station, in the early afternoon. We never called him by his name, which we didn’t know. We just called him “Frede’s nephew.”

They hired a girl to come pick me up at school and look after us. She lived in the house, in the room next to ours. She wore her black hair in a very strict bun, and her eyes were of such light green that her gaze seemed transparent. She almost never spoke. Her silence and transparent eyes intimidated my brother and me. For us, Little Hélène, Frede, and even Annie belonged to the world of the circus, but that silent young girl with her black bun and pale eyes was a creature from a fairy tale. We called her Snow White.

I still remember dinners when we were all together in the room that served as dining room, which was separated from the living room by the entrance hall. Snow White was sitting at the end of the table, my brother to her right, and I to her left. Annie was next to me, Little Hélène opposite, and Mathilde at the other end of the table. One evening, because the electricity was out, the room was lit by an oil lamp set on the mantelpiece, which left areas of shadow around us.

The others called her Snow White, like us, and sometimes “my lamb.” They used the familiar tu with her. And soon a certain intimacy grew among them, since Snow White also addressed them familiarly.

I suppose they had rented the house. Unless Little Hélène owned it, as the village merchants seemed to know her. Or maybe the house belonged to Frede. I remember that Frede received a lot of mail at Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. I was the one who fetched the letters from the box, every morning before school.

Almost every day, Annie went to Paris in her tan Peugeot 4CV. She would come home very late, and sometimes she stayed out until the next day. Often Little Hélène went with her. Mathilde never left the house, except to do the shopping. She’d buy a magazine called Noir et Blanc, old copies of which lay around the dining room. I’d leaf through them on Thursday afternoons, when it was raining and we were listening to a children’s program on the radio. Mathilde ripped Noir et Blanc out of my hands.

“That’s not for you, blissful idiot! You’re not old enough …”

Snow White waited for me when class got out, with my brother, who was still too little to start school. Annie had enrolled me in the Jeanne d’Arc school, at the very end of Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. The principal had asked if she was my mother and she’d said yes.

We were both sitting outside the principal’s office. Annie was wearing her old leather jacket and a pair of faded blue denim pants that a friend of hers who sometimes came to the house — Zina Rachevsky — had brought her back from America: blue jeans. You didn’t see them very often in France at the time. The principal looked at us suspiciously:

“Your son will have to wear a gray smock in class,” she said. “Like all his other little schoolmates.”

On the way back, all along Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, Annie walked next to me with her hand on my shoulder.

“I told her I was your mother because it was too complicated to explain the situation. That okay with you, Patoche?”

As for me, I was wondering about that gray smock I’d have to wear, like all my other little schoolmates.

I didn’t remain a pupil at the Jeanne d’Arc school for long. The schoolyard was black because it was paved with coal slag. And that black went perfectly with the bark and leaves of the plane trees.

One morning, during recess, the principal came up to me and said:

“I wish to see your mother. Tell her to come this afternoon, as soon as class resumes.”

As always, she spoke to me in cutting tones. She didn’t like me. What had I ever done to her?

When I left school at lunchtime, Snow White and my brother were waiting.

“You’re making a face,” said Snow White. “Something the matter?”

I asked if Annie was home. My one fear was that she hadn’t come back from Paris the night before.

As luck would have it, she had come home, but very late. She was still asleep in her room at the end of the hall, the one whose windows opened onto the garden.

“Go wake her up,” said Little Hélène, after I’d related that the school principal wanted to see my mother.

I knocked on the door to her room. She didn’t answer. The mysterious sentence we’d heard from Frede’s nephew crossed my mind: “Annie cried all night long at Carroll’s.” Yes, she was still asleep at noon because she’d spent all night crying at Carroll’s.

I turned the knob and pushed the door open, slowly. It was light in the room. Annie hadn’t drawn the curtains. She was stretched out on the large bed, all the way at the edge, and she could have fallen off at any moment. Why didn’t she lie in the middle of the bed? She was sleeping, her arm folded up on her shoulder, as if she were cold, and yet she was fully dressed. She hadn’t even removed her shoes or her old leather jacket. I gently shook her shoulder. She opened her eyes and looked at me, knitting her brow:

“Oh … It’s you, Patoche …”

She was pacing back and forth beneath the plane trees in the schoolyard, with the principal of the Jeanne d’Arc school. The principal had told me to wait for them in the yard while they talked. My schoolmates had gone back to class when the bell had rung at five minutes to two, and I watched them, there, behind the panes of glass, sitting at their desks, without me. I tried to hear what the two women were saying, but I didn’t dare go any nearer to them. Annie was wearing her old leather jacket over a man’s shirt.

And then she walked away from the principal and came up to me. The two of us went out through the little doorway cut into the wall, which led to Rue du Docteur-Dordaine.

“Poor Patoche … They’ve expelled you.”

I felt like crying, but when I looked up at her, I saw she was smiling. And that made me feel relieved.

“You’re a bad student … like me …”

Yes, I was relieved that she wouldn’t scold me, but all the same I was surprised that this event, which seemed so serious to me, made her smile.

“Don’t you fret, old Patoche … We’ll find you another school.”

I don’t think I was a worse student than anyone else. The principal of the Jeanne d’Arc school had no doubt gathered information about my family. She must have realized Annie was not my mother. Annie, Little Hélène, Mathilde, and even Snow White: curious family … She must have feared I’d set a poor example for my little schoolmates. What could she have had against us? First, Annie’s lie. It must have caught the principal’s attention right from the get-go: Annie looked younger than her age, and it might have been better if she’d claimed to be my older sister. And then her worn leather jacket and especially those faded blue jeans, which were so unusual at the time … Nothing to hold against Mathilde: a typical old woman, with her dark clothes, corsage, cameo, and Nîmes accent. On the other hand, Little Hélène sometimes dressed strangely when she took us to Mass or the village shops: riding breeches with boots, blouses with puffy sleeves drawn tight at the wrists, black ski pants, or even a bolero jacket encrusted with mother-of-pearl … You could tell what her former occupation had been. And yet, the news dealer and the baker seemed fond of her, and always addressed her with respect:

“Good afternoon, Mademoiselle Toch … Good-bye, Mademoiselle Toch … What shall it be for Mademoiselle Toch today …?”

And what could one hold against Snow White? Her silence, black bun, and transparent eyes commanded respect. The principal of the Jeanne d’Arc school surely wondered why that girl came to fetch me after school, instead of my mother; and why I didn’t just go home by myself, like my other little friends. She must have thought we were rich.

Who knows? All the principal had to do was lay eyes on Annie for her to distrust us. Even I, one evening, had overheard a few bits of conversation between Little Hélène and Mathilde. Annie hadn’t got back from Paris yet in her 4CV and Mathilde seemed anxious.

“I wouldn’t put anything past her,” Mathilde had said, looking pensive. “You know as well as I do what a hothead she is, Linou.”

“She wouldn’t do anything really serious,” Little Hélène had said.

Mathilde had remained silent a moment, then said:

“You know, Linou, you keep some mighty peculiar company …”

Little Hélène’s face had grown hard.

“Peculiar? What’s that supposed to mean, Thilda?”

She’d spoken in a harsh voice I’d never heard from her before.

“Don’t get mad, Linou,” Mathilde had said, sounding scared and docile.

This was not the same woman who called me “blissful idiot.”

As of that moment, I realized that Annie, during her absences, did not always spend her time crying all night long at Carroll’s. She might have been doing something really serious. Later, when I asked what had happened, they told me, “Something very serious,” and it was like an echo of the sentence I’d previously heard. But that evening, the expression “hothead” was what worried me. Whenever I looked at Annie’s face, all I saw was affection. Could there have been a hothead lurking behind those limpid eyes and that smile?

I was now a pupil at the town public school, a bit farther away than Jeanne d’Arc. You had to follow Rue du Docteur-Dordaine to the end and cross the road that descended toward the town hall and the grade crossing. A large iron double gate led to the recess yard.

Here, too, we wore gray smocks, but the yard wasn’t paved with slag. It was just dirt, plain and simple. The teacher liked me and every morning asked me to read a poem to the class. One day, Little Hélène came to fetch me, instead of Snow White. She was wearing her riding breeches, boots, and a jacket that I called her “cowboy jacket.” She shook the teacher’s hand and told him she was my aunt.

“Your nephew reads poetry very well,” the teacher had said.

I always read the same one, the one my brother and I knew by heart:

Oh how many sailors, how many captains …

I had some good friends in that class: the son of the florist on Rue du Docteur-Dordaine; the pharmacist’s son, and I remember the morning when we learned his father had hanged himself; the son of the baker at the Food Hamlet, whose sister was my age and had blond, curly hair that fell to her ankles.

Often Snow White didn’t come to fetch me: she knew I’d come home with the florist’s son, whose house was next door to ours. When school got out, on afternoons when we didn’t have any homework, a group of us would go to the other end of town, past the chateau and the train station, all the way to the large water mill, on the banks of the Bièvre. It was still operational, and yet it looked dilapidated and abandoned. On Thursdays when Frede’s nephew wasn’t there, I’d bring my brother. It was an adventure we had to keep secret. We slipped through the gap in the surrounding wall and sat on the ground, side by side. The huge wheel turned round and round. We could hear the rumbling of a motor and the roar of the waterfall. It felt cool here, and it smelled like water and wet grass. The huge wheel gleaming in the half-darkness frightened us a bit, but we couldn’t help watching it turn, sitting side by side, arms hugging our knees.

My father would visit between trips to Brazzaville. He didn’t drive, and since someone had to bring him from Paris to our town, his friends would pick him up by turns: Annet Badel, Sasha Gordine, Robert Fly, Jacques Boudot-Lamotte, Georges Giorgini, Geza Pellmont, fat Lucien P., who would sit on an armchair in the living room, and each time we were afraid the chair would collapse or split beneath him; Stioppa de D., who wore a monocle and a fur coat, and whose hair was so thick with pomade that it left stains on the couches and walls against which Stioppa leaned his neck.

These visits occurred on Thursdays, and my father would take us out to lunch at the Robin des Bois inn. Annie and Little Hélène were out. Mathilde stayed home. Only Snow White would come to lunch with us. And sometimes Frede’s nephew.

My father had been a regular at the Robin des Bois a long time ago. He talked about it during one of our lunches with his friend Geza Pellmont, and I listened in on their conversation.

“You remember?” Pellmont had said. “We used to come here with Eliot Salter …”

“The chateau’s in ruins,” my father had said.

The chateau was at the end of Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, across from the Jeanne d’Arc school. Attached to the half-open gate was a rotting wooden sign, on which one could still read, “Property commandeered by the U.S. Army for Brigadier General Frank Allen.” On Thursdays we’d slip between the panels of the gate. The overgrown field of grass came to our waists. At the far end rose a Louis XIII — style chateau, its façade flanked by two detached houses standing forward from it. I later learned that it had been built at the end of the nineteenth century. We flew a kite in the field, a kite made of blue-and-red canvas and shaped like an airplane. We had a hard time getting it to soar very high. Farther on, to the right of the chateau, was a knoll with pine trees, and a stone bench on which Snow White sat. She read Noir et Blanc or else did her knitting, while we climbed into the pine branches. But we got dizzy, my brother and I, and only Frede’s nephew made it to the top.

Toward midafternoon, we followed the path leading away from the knoll and, along with Snow White, we penetrated into the forest. We walked all the way to the Food Hamlet. In autumn we’d gather chestnuts. The baker at the Hamlet was my schoolmate’s dad, and every time we went into his shop my friend’s sister was there, and I admired her wavy blond hair that fell to her ankles. And then we went back by the same path. In the twilight, the façade and two forward-projecting outbuildings of the chateau looked sinister and made our hearts pound, my brother’s and mine.

“Shall we go see the chateau?”

From then on, these were the words my father spoke at the end of every lunch. And just like the other Thursdays, we followed Rue du Docteur-Dordaine and slipped through the half-open gate into the field. Except that, on those days, my father and one of his friends — Badel, Gordine, Stioppa, or Robert Fly — came with us.

Snow White went to sit on the bench at the base of the pines, in her usual spot. My father approached the chateau, contemplating the façade and the tall, boarded-up windows. He pushed open the main door and we walked into a grand entrance hall, whose tiling was buried under rubble and dead leaves. At the back of the hall was an elevator cage.

“I used to know the owner of this chateau,” said my father.

He could see my brother and I were curious. So he told us the story of Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade, who, at the age of twenty, during the First World War, had been a flying ace. Then he’d married an Argentinian woman and become the king of Armagnac. Armagnac, said my father, was a liqueur that Salter, the marquis de Caussade, made and sold in very handsome bottles by the truckload. I helped him unload all those trucks, said my father. We counted the cases, one by one. He had bought this chateau. He had disappeared at the end of the last war with his wife, but he wasn’t dead and someday he’d be back.

Gingerly my father peeled off a small notice affixed to the inside of the front door and gave it to me. Even today, without the slightest hesitation, I can still recite what was written on it:

Seizure of illegal gains

Tuesday, July 23, at 2:00 p.m.

At the Food Hamlet

Magnificent property

including chateau and 750 acres of forestland

“Keep an eye on this place, boys,” said my father. “The marquis will be back, and sooner than you think …”

And before getting into the car of whatever friend was driving him that day, he bid us good-bye with a distracted hand, which we could still see waving limply through the window as the car headed off to Paris.

We had decided, my brother and I, to visit the chateau at night. We had to wait until everyone in the house was asleep. Mathilde’s room took up the ground floor of a tiny cottage at the back of the courtyard: no danger of her hearing us. Little Hélène’s room was upstairs in the house, at the other end of the hall, and Snow White’s was next to ours. The hall floor creaked a bit, but once we made it to the foot of the stairs we’d have nothing to fear and it would be clear sailing. We would pick a night when Annie wasn’t home, as she went to bed very late — a night when she was crying at Carroll’s.

We’d taken the flashlight from the kitchen cupboard, a silvery metal flashlight that produced a yellowish beam. And we got dressed. We left on our pajama tops under our sweaters. To keep awake, we talked about Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade. Taking turns, we came up with the wildest tales about him. On the nights when he visited the chateau, according to my brother, he arrived at the local station on the last train from Paris, the eleven-thirty-three, whose rhythmic rumbling we could hear from our bedroom window. He liked to avoid drawing attention to himself and so didn’t park his car in front of the chateau gate, which would have aroused suspicion. Instead, it was on foot, like a simple pedestrian, that he went to his property for the night.

We were both convinced of the same thing: on those nights, Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade, stayed in the great hall of the chateau. Before his arrival, someone had swept up the dead leaves and rubble, and afterward they would put it all back to cover every trace of his passage. And the person who made these preparations for his master’s visit was the gamekeeper. He lived in the forest, between the Food Hamlet and the edge of the Villacoublay airfield. We often met him during our walks with Snow White. We had asked the baker’s son for the name of this faithful servant who hid his secret so well: Grosclaude.

It was no coincidence that Grosclaude lived there. We had discovered, in that area of the forest that bordered the airfield, an abandoned landing strip with a large hangar. The marquis used that landing strip at night, to head off in an airplane toward some faraway destination — an island in the South Seas. After a while, he would return from there. And on those nights, Grosclaude would set out small light signals so the marquis could land more easily.

The marquis was sitting in a velvet armchair in front of the massive fireplace where Grosclaude had lit a fire. Behind him, the table was set: silver candelabras, lace, and crystal. We entered the great hall, my brother and I. The only light was from the fire in the fireplace and the flame of the candles. Grosclaude saw us first and came charging up to us, with his boots and riding breeches.

“What do you think you’re doing here?”

His voice was threatening. He’d surely give us both a couple of slaps and throw us out. It would be better if, when we entered the hall, we went straight up to the marquis de Caussade and talked to him directly. And we tried to plan in advance what we would say.

“We’ve come to see you because you’re a friend of my father’s.”

I would be the one to speak that first sentence. After that, in turn, we’d say:

“Good evening, my Lord.”

And I would add:

“We know that you’re the king of Armagnac.”

Still, there was one detail that worried me: the moment when the marquis Eliot Salter de Caussade turned his face toward us. My father had told us that his face had been burned during an aerial battle in the First World War, and that he concealed this burn by covering his skin with ochre-colored makeup. In that entrance hall, in the light of the candles and the wood fire, that face must have been terrifying. But at least I would finally see what I tried to see behind Annie’s smile and bright eyes: a hothead.

We had crept down the stairs on tiptoe, our shoes in our hands. The kitchen clock said eleven-twenty-five. We had gently closed the front door to the house and the small metal gate that opened onto Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. Sitting on the curb, we laced up our shoes. The rumble of the train was approaching. It would be in the station in a few minutes and would leave only a single passenger on the platform: Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade and the king of Armagnac.

We chose nights when the sky was clear, when the stars shone around a sliver of moon. Our shoes tied, the flashlight hidden between my sweater and my pajama top, we now had to walk to the chateau. The empty street in the moonlight, the silence, and the feeling that came over us of having left home for good gradually made us slow our steps. After about fifty yards, we turned back.

Now we unlaced our shoes and gently closed the front door to the house. The alarm clock in the kitchen said twenty minutes to midnight. I put the flashlight back in the cupboard and we tiptoed back up the stairs.

Huddled in our twin beds, we felt a certain relief. We spoke in low whispers about the marquis, and each of us came up with a new detail. It was past midnight, and over there, in the great hall, Grosclaude was serving him his supper. The next time, before turning back, we’d go a bit farther down Rue du Docteur-Dordaine than we had this time. We’d go as far as the convent. And the next time after that, even farther, up to the farm and the barbershop. And the time after that, farther still. A new milestone every night. Then there would only be a few dozen yards to go before we reached the chateau fence. The next time … We ended up falling asleep.

I had noticed that Annie and Little Hélène occasionally received visits at the house from people as mysterious and worthy of interest as Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade.

Was it Annie who kept up the friendships? Or Little Hélène? Both, I think. For her part, Mathilde maintained a certain reserve in their presence, and often she went to her room. Perhaps those people intimidated her, or maybe she just didn’t like them.

I’m trying today to count all the faces I saw on the front porch or in the living room — without being able to identify most of them. No matter. If I could put names to those ten or so faces parading through my memory, it would prove embarrassing for some people who are still alive. They’d remember that they used to keep bad company.

The ones whose images remain the clearest are Roger Vincent, Jean D., and Andrée K., who they said was “the wife of a big-shot doctor.” They came to the house two or three times a week. They went to have lunch at the Robin des Bois inn with Annie and Little Hélène, and afterward they’d sit around a while longer in the living room. Or else they stayed for dinner at the house.

Sometimes Jean D. came alone. Annie would bring him from Paris in her 4CV. He was the one who seemed closest to Annie and who had probably introduced her to the two others. Jean D. and Annie were the same age. When Jean D. came to visit with Roger Vincent, it was always in Roger Vincent’s American convertible. Sometimes Andrée K. came with them, and she would sit in the front seat of the American car, next to Roger Vincent; Jean D. was in back. Roger Vincent must have been around forty-five at the time, and Andrée K. thirty-five.

I remember the first time we saw Roger Vincent’s American car parked in front of the house. It was the end of the morning, after class. I hadn’t yet been expelled from the Jeanne d’Arc school. From a distance, that huge convertible, with its tan body and red leather seats gleaming in the sun, had surprised my brother and me as much as if we’d turned a corner in the road and suddenly found ourselves face to face with the marquis de Caussade. Moreover, we’d had the same thought at the same moment, as we later confided to each other: the car belonged to the marquis de Caussade, who was back in the village after all his adventures and had been invited over by my father.

I said to Snow White:

“Whose car is that?”

“A friend of your godmother’s.”

She always called Annie my “godmother,” and it was in fact the case that we’d been baptized one year earlier at the church of Saint-Martin de Biarritz and that my mother had asked Annie to act as my godmother.

When we went inside the house, the living room door was open and Roger Vincent was sitting on the couch, next to the bow window.

“Come say hello,” said Little Hélène.

She had just poured out three glasses and was stopping up one of the liquor decanters with the enamel tags. Annie was on the telephone.

Roger Vincent stood up. He seemed very tall. He was wearing a glen plaid suit. His hair was white, well groomed, and brushed back, but he didn’t seem old. He leaned toward us and smiled.

“Hello, children …”

He shook our hands in turn. I had put down my schoolbag to shake his. I was wearing my gray smock.

“Are you just getting home from school?”

“Yes,” I said.

“School going well?”

“Yes.”

Annie had hung up the phone and joined us; Little Hélène set the liquor tray on the coffee table in front of the couch. She handed Roger Vincent a glass.

“Patoche and his brother live here,” Annie said.

“Well, then, to the health of Patoche and his brother,” said Roger Vincent, raising his glass with a wide smile.

In my memory, that smile remains Roger Vincent’s main attribute: it was always playing about his lips. Roger Vincent bathed in that smile, which was distant and dreamy rather than jovial, and which enveloped him like a very light mist. There was something muffled about that smile, as about his voice and bearing. Roger Vincent never made any noise. You never heard him coming, and when you turned around, there he was behind you. From the window of our room, we sometimes saw him arrive at the wheel of his American car. It stopped in front of the house like a speedboat with its motor cut off, carried in by the tide to berth silently on the shore. Roger Vincent stepped out of the car, his movements slow, his smile on his lips. He never slammed the door, but rather closed it gently.

That day, they were still in the living room when we finished our lunch with Snow White in the kitchen. Mathilde was tending the rose bush she had planted on the first terrace of the garden, near the grave of Doctor Guillotin.

I was holding my satchel, and Snow White was going to take me back to the Jeanne d’Arc school for afternoon classes, when Annie, who had appeared in the doorway to the living room, said to me:

“Study well, Patoche …”

Behind her, I saw Little Hélène and Roger Vincent smiling his immutable smile. No doubt they were about to leave the house to go have lunch at the Robin des Bois inn.

“Are you walking to school?” asked Roger Vincent.

“Yes.”

Even when he talked, he smiled.

“I can take you in the car, if you like …”

“Did you see Roger Vincent’s car?” Annie asked me.

“Yes.”

She always called him “Roger Vincent,” with respectful affection, as if his first and last names were inseparable. I sometimes heard her on the telephone: “Hello, Roger Vincent … How are you, Roger Vincent …” She used the formal vous. She and Jean D. had great admiration for him. Jean D. called him “Roger Vincent” as well. When Annie and Jean D. talked about him, they seemed to be telling “Roger Vincent stories,” as if they were recounting ancient legends. Andrée K., “the wife of the big-shot doctor,” called him just Roger, and she said tu.

“Would you like it if I took you to school in my car?” asked Roger Vincent.

He had guessed what we wanted, my brother and I. We both climbed into the front seat next to him.

He backed majestically up the gentle slope of the avenue, and the car followed Rue du Docteur-Dordaine.

We glided on slack water. I couldn’t hear the sound of the motor. It was the first time my brother and I had ridden in a convertible. And that car was so big that it covered the entire width of the street.

“Here’s my school …”

He stopped the car and, stretching out his arm, opened the passenger door so that I could get out.

“Good luck, Patoche.”

I was proud to hear him call me Patoche, as if he’d known me for a long time. My brother was now all alone next to him, and he looked even smaller on that huge red leather seat. I turned around before going into the courtyard of the Jeanne d’Arc school. Roger Vincent waved at me. He was smiling.

Jean D. didn’t have an American convertible, but he had a fat wristwatch on whose face we could read the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years. He explained the complicated mechanism of that watch with its many buttons. He was much more at ease with us than Roger Vincent. And younger.

He wore a suede windbreaker, sporty turtleneck sweaters, and shoes with crepe soles. He, too, was tall and thin. Dark hair and a face with regular features. When his brown eyes rested on us, they were lit by a mix of mischief and sadness. His eyes were always widening, as if everything astonished him. I envied him his haircut: a long brush cut, whereas in my case, every two weeks the barber gave me a crew cut so short that the hairs pinched when I ran my hand over my scalp and above my ears. But there was nothing I could say. The barber simply picked up his clippers without asking my opinion.

Jean D. came to the house more often than the others. Annie always brought him in her 4CV. He had lunch with us and always sat next to Annie, at the large dining room table. Mathilde called him “my little Jean,” and she didn’t show the same reserve with him as she did with the other visitors. He called Little Hélène “Linou”—the same as Mathilde did. He always said, “How’s it going, Linou?”—and he called me “Patoche,” like Annie.

He lent my brother and me his watch. We were able to wear it, taking turns, for a whole week. The leather strap was too big, so he made another hole in it to keep it tight around our wrists. I wore that watch to the Jeanne d’Arc school and showed it off to the schoolmates huddled around me in the playground that day. Maybe the principal noticed that huge watch on my wrist, and saw me from her window getting out of Roger Vincent’s American car … Then she thought that was quite enough of that and that my place was not at the Jeanne d’Arc school.

“What sort of books do you read?” Jean D. asked me one day.

They were all having coffee in the living room after lunch: Annie, Mathilde, Little Hélène, and Snow White. It was a Thursday. We were waiting for Frede, who was supposed to arrive with her nephew. We had decided, my brother and I, to venture into the great hall of the chateau that afternoon, as we’d already done with my father. The presence of Frede’s nephew at our sides would bolster our courage.

“Patoche reads a ton,” answered Annie. “Isn’t that so, Snow White?”

“He reads way too much for his age,” said Snow White.

My brother and I had dipped a lump of sugar into Annie’s coffee cup and crunched it, as our ceremony required. Afterward, when they’d finished their coffee, Mathilde would read their future in the empty cups—“in the dregs,” as she said.

“So what do you read?” asked Jean D.

I told him adventure stories: Jules Verne, The Last of the Mohicans … but I preferred The Three Musketeers because of the fleur de lys on Milady’s shoulder.

“You should read pulps,” said Jean D.

“Jean, you’re crazy,” said Annie, laughing. “Patoche is way too young for pulps …”

“He’s got plenty of time ahead of him to read pulps,” said Little Hélène.

Apparently, neither Mathilde nor Snow White knew what “pulps” were. They kept silent.

A few days later, he returned to the house in Annie’s 4CV. It was raining that late afternoon, and Jean D. was wearing a fur-lined coat called a “Canadienne.” My brother and I were listening to the radio, both seated at the dining room table, and when we saw him come in with Annie, we got up to greet him.

“Here,” said Jean D., “I brought you a pulp …”

He took a black-and-yellow-covered book from the pocket of his jacket and handed it to me.

“Pay no attention, Patoche,” said Annie. “He’s just joking. That’s not a book for you …”

Jean D. looked at me with his slightly widened eyes, his sad, tender gaze. At certain moments, I had the sense that he was a child, like us. Annie often spoke to him in the same tone she used with us.

“No, seriously …” said Jean D. “I’m sure you’ll like this book.”

I took it so as not to hurt his feelings. Still today, whenever I come across one of the black-and-yellow covers of the Série Noire, a deep, slightly drawling voice echoes in my head, the voice of Jean D., who that evening repeated to me and my brother the title written on the book he’d given us: Don’t Touch the Loot.

Was it the same day? It was raining. We had accompanied Snow White to the news dealer’s because she wanted to buy some stationery. When we left the house, Annie and Jean D. were both sitting in the 4CV, parked in front of the door. They were talking and were so absorbed in their conversation that they didn’t see us, even though I waved at them. Jean D. had pulled the collar of his Canadienne up around his neck. When we returned, they were still in the 4CV. I leaned toward them, but they didn’t even look. They were talking and they both had serious faces.

Little Hélène was playing solitaire on the dining room table and listening to the radio. Mathilde must have been in her bedroom. My brother and I went up to ours. Through the window, I watched the 4CV in the rain. They stayed in it, talking, all the way to dinnertime. What secrets could they have been sharing?

Roger Vincent and Jean D. often came for dinner at the house, along with Andrée K. Other guests arrived after dinner. On those evenings, they all stayed in the living room until very late. From our bedroom we could hear shouts and bursts of laughter. And the phone ringing. And the doorbell. We ate dinner at seven-thirty in the kitchen, with Snow White. The dining room table was already set for Roger Vincent, Jean D., Andrée K., Annie, Mathilde, and Little Hélène. Little Hélène cooked for them, and they all said she was “a real cordon bleu.”

Before going up to bed, we went into the living room to say good night. We were in our pajamas and bathrobes — two plaid flannel bathrobes that Annie had given us as presents.

The others would join them later in the evening. I couldn’t help watching them, through the slats of the blinds in our room, once Snow White had turned out the lights and wished us good night. They came, one by one, and rang at the door. I could easily see their faces under the bright light of the bulb above the porch. Some of them have been engraved indelibly in my memory. And I’m amazed the police never questioned me: children see things, after all. They also hear things.

“You have very handsome bathrobes,” said Roger Vincent.

And he smiled.

We first shook Andrée K.’s hand, who always sat on the chair with the flowered upholstery next to the telephone. People called her while she was at the house. Little Hélène, who usually picked up, would say:

“Andrée, it’s for you …”

Andrée K. stretched out her arm to us nonchalantly. She smiled, too, but her smile didn’t last as long as Roger Vincent’s.

“Good night, children.”

She had freckles on her face, prominent cheekbones, green eyes, and light brown hair cut in bangs. She smoked a lot.

We shook Roger Vincent’s hand, who was always smiling. Then Jean D.’s. We kissed Annie and Little Hélène good night. Before leaving the living room with Snow White, Roger Vincent complimented us again on the elegance of our bathrobes.

We were at the foot of the stairs when Jean D. stuck his head through the half-open door to the living room.

“Sleep tight.”

He looked at us with his tender, slightly widened eyes. He gave us a wink and said in a lower voice, as if it were our secret:

“Don’t touch the loot.”

One Thursday, Snow White took a day off. She had gone to visit family in Paris and had left with Annie and Mathilde after lunch, in the 4CV. We stayed home in the care of Little Hélène. We were playing in the garden at setting up a canvas tent Annie had given me for my last birthday. Around midafternoon, Roger Vincent came by, alone. He and Little Hélène talked together in the courtyard of the house, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Little Hélène told us she had to run an errand in Versailles and asked us to come with them.

We were thrilled to ride in Roger Vincent’s American car again. It was April, during Easter vacation. Little Hélène sat in front. She was wearing her riding breeches and her cowboy jacket. We were sitting on the huge back seat, my brother and I, and our feet didn’t reach the floor of the car.

Roger Vincent drove slowly. He looked back toward us, with his smile:

“Would you like me to turn on the radio?”

The radio? So you could listen to the radio in this car? He pushed an ivory button on the dashboard, and instantly we heard music.

“Should I turn it up or down, boys?” he asked us.

We didn’t dare answer. We listened to the music coming from the dashboard. And then a woman started singing in a raspy voice.

“That’s Edith singing, boys,” said Roger Vincent. “She’s a friend …”

He asked Little Hélène:

“Do you still see Edith?”

“Now and then,” said Little Hélène.

We drove down a large avenue and arrived in Versailles. The car stopped at a red light, and we admired, on a lawn to our left, a clock whose numbers were made of flowerbeds.

“The next time,” Little Hélène said to us, “I’ll take you to see the palace.”

She asked Roger Vincent to stop at a store where they sold used furniture.

“Boys, you stay here in the car,” said Roger Vincent. “Watch the car for me …”

We were proud to be entrusted with such an important mission and we watched the comings and goings of the passers-by like hawks. Behind the window of the store, Roger Vincent and Little Hélène were talking with a dark-haired man wearing a raincoat and a mustache. They spoke for a very long time. They had forgotten about us.

They came out of the store. Roger Vincent was holding a leather suitcase that he stashed in the trunk. He got back behind the wheel, with Little Hélène next to him. He turned back toward me:

“Anything to report?”

“No … Nothing …” I said.

“So much the better,” said Roger Vincent.

On the way back, in Versailles, we followed an avenue at the end of which rose a brick church. Several fairground stalls occupied the median strip, around a glittering bumper car track. Roger Vincent parked along the curb.

“Shall we take them for a ride in the bumper cars?” he asked Little Hélène.

The four of us waited at the side of the track. Music blared very loud through speakers. Only three cars were being used by customers, two of which chased the third and rammed it at the same time, on either side, producing screams and shouts of laughter. The trolley poles left trails of sparks along the ceiling of the track. But what captivated me more than anything was the color of the cars: turquoise, pale green, yellow, purple, bright red, mauve, pink, midnight blue … They stopped moving and their occupants left the track. My brother climbed into a yellow car with Roger Vincent, and I, with Little Hélène, into a turquoise one.

We were the only ones on the track, and we didn’t ram each other. Roger Vincent and Little Hélène drove. We circled the track, and Little Hélène and I followed Roger Vincent and my brother’s car. We zigzagged among the other cars, empty and motionless. The music played less loudly, and the man who had sold us our tickets looked forlorn, standing at the side of the track as if we were the last customers ever.

It was nearly dark. We stopped at the edge of the track. I looked one more time at all those cars with their bright colors. We talked about it, my brother and I, in our room after lights out. We had decided to build a track in the courtyard the next day, with old planks from the storage shed. Naturally, it wouldn’t be easy to get hold of a bumper car, but maybe you could find old ones that didn’t work. It was mainly the color that interested us: I couldn’t decide between mauve and turquoise; my brother had a predilection for very pale green.

The air was warm and Roger Vincent hadn’t put down the top of his convertible. He was talking with Little Hélène, and I was thinking too much about those bumper cars we’d just discovered to listen to their grown-up conversation. We drove past the airfield and would soon turn left onto the road that went up to the village. They raised their voices. They weren’t arguing, just talking about Andrée K.

“Sure she was,” said Roger Vincent. “Andrée was part of the Rue Lauriston gang …”

“Andrée was part of the Rue Lauriston gang.” That sentence had struck me. In school, we, too, had a gang: the florist’s son, the barber’s son, and two or three others I don’t remember, who all lived on the same street. They called us “the Rue du Docteur-Dordaine gang.” Andrée K. had been part of a gang, like us, but on a different street. That woman who so intimidated my brother and me, with her bangs, her freckles, her green eyes, her cigarettes and mysterious phone calls, now suddenly seemed more like us. Roger Vincent and Little Hélène also seemed to be very familiar with that “Rue Lauriston gang.” Subsequently, I again overheard the name in their conversation and I became used to the sound of it. A few years later, I heard it in the mouth of my father, but I didn’t know that “the Rue Lauriston gang” would haunt me for such a long time.

When we arrived back on Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, Annie’s 4CV was there. Behind it was a huge motorcycle. In the vestibule, Jean D. told us the motorcycle was his and that he’d come to the house on it all the way from Paris. He hadn’t removed his Canadienne. He promised to take us for a ride on the motorcycle, by turns, but tonight it was too late. Snow White would be back the next morning. Mathilde had already gone to bed, and Annie asked us to go up to our room for a bit because they needed to talk. Roger Vincent went into the living room, leather suitcase in hand. Little Hélène, Annie, and Jean D. followed him in, and they closed the door behind them. I had watched them from the top of the stairs. What could they be saying to each other, there in the living room? I heard the telephone ring.

After a while, Annie called us. We all ate dinner together at the dining room table: Annie, Little Hélène, Jean D., Roger Vincent, and the two of us. That evening, at dinner, we were not wearing our bathrobes, as usual, but rather our daytime clothes. Little Hélène did the cooking because she was a real cordon bleu.

We lived on Rue du Docteur-Dordaine for much more than a year. The seasons follow one another in my memory. In winter, at midnight Mass, we were choirboys in the village church. Annie, Little Hélène, and Mathilde attended Mass. Snow White spent Christmas with her family. When we got back, Roger Vincent was at the house, and he told us someone was waiting in the living room. My brother and I went in and found Santa Claus, sitting on the chair with the flowered upholstery next to the telephone. He didn’t speak. He handed each of us, in silence, presents covered in silver paper. But we didn’t have a chance to unwrap them. He stood up and motioned for us to follow. He and Roger Vincent led us to the glass-paneled door that looked out on the courtyard. On the wooden planks we had laid end to end, there was a bumper car colored pale green — the way my brother liked them. Then we had dinner together. Jean D. showed up to join us. He had the same height and movements as Santa Claus. And the same watch.

Snow on the playground at school. And freezing rains in March. I had discovered that it rained practically every other day and I could predict the weather. I was always right. For the first time in our lives, we went to the movies. With Snow White. It was a Laurel and Hardy film. The apple trees in the garden flowered anew. Once more, I accompanied the Rue du Docteur-Dordaine gang to the mill, whose large wheel was turning again. We began flying kites again, in front of the chateau. We were no longer afraid, my brother and I, of going into the great hall and walking among the rubble and dead leaves. We sat down at the far end, in the elevator, an elevator with two screen doors, made of light paneled wood and with a red leather bench. It had no ceiling and daylight fell from the top of the shaft, through the still intact skylight. We pushed the buttons and pretended to go up to the various floors, where the marquis Eliot Salter de Caussade might have been expecting us.

But he wasn’t seen in town that year. It was very hot. Flies stuck to the flypaper stretched on the wall of the kitchen. We planned a picnic in the forest with Snow White and Frede’s nephew. What my brother and I liked best was making the bumper car glide over the old planks — a bumper car that we later learned Little Hélène had found through a friend who worked in a fairground.

On Bastille Day, Roger Vincent took us out to dinner at the Robin des Bois inn. He had come from Paris with Jean D. and Andrée K. We sat at a table in the garden of the inn, a garden decorated with groves and statues. Everyone was there: Annie, Little Hélène, Snow White, and even Mathilde. Annie was wearing her light blue dress and wide black belt that hugged her waist very tight. I was sitting next to Andrée K. and I wanted to ask her about the gang she’d been in, the one on Rue Lauriston, but I didn’t dare.

And autumn … We went with Snow White to gather chestnuts in the forest. We hadn’t heard from our parents. The last postcard from our mother had been a bird’s-eye view of the city of Tunis. Our father had written us from Brazzaville. Then from Bangui. And after that, nothing. It was the start of the school season. The teacher, after gym, made us rake up the dead leaves on the playground. In the courtyard of the house we let them fall without raking them up, and they took on a rust-red color that clashed with the light green of the bumper car. The latter seemed stuck for all eternity in the middle of a track of dead leaves. We sat in the bumper car, my brother and I, and I leaned on the steering wheel. Tomorrow we would invent a system to make it glide. Tomorrow … Always tomorrow, like those nighttime visits to the marquis de Caussade’s chateau that we kept postponing.

There was another power outage, and we lit the house with an oil lamp at dinnertime. On Saturday evening, Mathilde and Snow White lit a fire in the dining room fireplace and let us listen to the radio. Sometimes we heard Edith, who was friends with Roger Vincent and Little Hélène. At night, before falling asleep, I leafed through Little Hélène’s photo album, where there were pictures of her, her and her work colleagues. Two particularly impressed me: the American Chester Kingston, whose limbs were as supple as rubber and who could dislocate himself so well that they called him the “puzzle man.” And Alfredo Codona, the trapeze artist Little Hélène told us about so often and who had taught her the trade. That world of circuses and music halls was the only one my brother and I wanted to live in, perhaps because our mother used to take us with her, when we were little, into the wings and dressing rooms of the theaters.

The others still came to the house. Roger Vincent, Jean D., Andrée K…. And the ones who rang at the door after dark, who I spied on through the slats of the blinds, their faces lit by the bulb above the front door porch. Voices, laughter, and telephone rings. And Annie and Jean D., in the 4CV, in the rain.

I never saw them in the years that followed, except, once, for Jean D. I was twenty years old. I had a room on Rue Coustou, near Place Blanche. I was trying to write my first book. A friend had invited me out to a neighborhood restaurant. When I went to join him, he was with two other guests: Jean D. and a girl who was with him.

Jean D. had hardly aged. A few gray hairs on his temples, but he still had his long brush cut. Tiny wrinkles around the eyes. He wasn’t wearing a Canadienne this time, but rather a very elegant gray suit. It occurred to me that we were no longer the same, he and I. Throughout the entire meal, we never once alluded to the old days. He asked what I was doing in life. He used the familiar tu and called me Patrick. He had surely explained to the two others that he’d known me for a long time.

As for me, I knew a little more about him than when I was a child. That year, the kidnapping of a Moroccan politician had been front-page news. One of the protagonists in the affair had died under mysterious circumstances, on Rue des Renaudes, just as the police broke down his door. Jean D. was a friend of that person and the last one to see him alive. He had given testimony that had been reported in the papers. But the articles also contained other details: Jean D. had once served seven years in prison. They didn’t say why, but, judging from the dates, his troubles had begun around the time we lived on Rue du Docteur-Dordaine.

We didn’t say a word about those articles. I simply asked him if he lived in Paris.

“I have an office on Faubourg Saint-Honoré. You’ll have to come by …”

After dinner, my friend disappeared. I found myself alone with Jean D. and the girl who was with him, a brunette who must have been a dozen years younger than he.

“Can I drop you somewhere?”

He opened the door of a Jaguar parked in front of the restaurant. I had learned from the newspaper accounts that in certain circles they called him “the Tall Man with the Jaguar.” Since the start of dinner, I’d been looking for a way to ask him about a past that still remained a mystery.

“Is this car the reason they call you ‘the Tall Man with the Jaguar’?” I asked.

But he merely shrugged and didn’t answer.

He wanted to see my room on Rue Coustou. He and the girl, behind me, climbed the narrow staircase whose worn red carpet gave off a funny odor. They came into the room and the girl took the one chair — a wicker armchair. Jean D. remained standing.

It was strange to see him in that room, in his elegant gray suit and dark silk tie. The girl looked around her and didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the décor.

“So, you’re a writer? How’s it working out?”

He leaned over the bridge table and looked at the sheets of paper that I labored to fill, day after day.

“You write with a Bic?”

He smiled.

“Does the place have heat?”

“No.”

“But you’re getting by?”

What could I tell him? That I didn’t know how I was going to find five hundred francs to pay the rent this month? Of course we’d known each other a long time, but that was no reason to unburden myself on him.

“I’m getting by,” I said.

“Doesn’t seem like it.”

For a moment, we faced each other in the window frame. Even though they called him “the Tall Man with the Jaguar,” I was now a little taller than he was. He covered me with a look that was affectionate and naïve, the same as in the days of Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. He rolled his tongue between his lips, and I remember that he’d done that at the house, too, when he was thinking. That way of rolling his tongue between his lips and being lost in thought is something I later discovered in someone else — the writer Emmanuel Berl — and it moved me.

He kept silent. So did I. His girlfriend was still sitting in the wicker chair and leafing through a magazine that she’d grabbed off the bed. All things considered, it was better that the girl was there, otherwise we would have started talking, Jean D. and I. It hadn’t been easy: I could read it in his eyes. At the first words, we would have collapsed like those puppets in shooting galleries when the pellet hits the mark. Annie, Little Hélène, and Roger Vincent had certainly wound up in jail. I had lost my brother. The thread had snapped — a gossamer strand. There was nothing left of all that …

He turned to his girlfriend and said:

“There’s a nice view from here … It’s just like the Côte d’Azur.”

The window looked out on narrow Rue Puget, where no one ever walked. A shabby bar on the corner, a former Coal and Spirits shop in front of which a solitary streetwalker stood waiting. Always the same. And for nothing.

“Nice view, eh?”

Jean D. inspected the room, the bed, the bridge table at which I wrote every day. I saw him from the back. His friend leaned her forehead against the window and contemplated Rue Puget below.

They left, wishing me good luck. A few moments later, I discovered on the bridge table four five hundred — franc bills, neatly folded. I tried to find the address of his office on Faubourg Saint-Honoré. In vain. And I never again saw the Tall Man with the Jaguar.

On Thursdays and Saturdays when Snow White wasn’t there, Annie would take my brother and me to Paris in her 4CV. She always followed the same route and, with some effort of memory, I was able to reconstruct it. We took the western highway and drove through the Saint-Cloud tunnel. We crossed a bridge over the Seine, then went along the river through Boulogne and Neuilly. I remember large houses near the banks, protected by fences and foliage. Also barges and floating houses that one reached via wooden stairs: at the foot of those stairs were mailboxes, each with a name on it.

“I’m going to buy a barge here and we’ll all live on it,” said Annie.

We arrived at the Porte Maillot. I was able to locate that stop in our itinerary because of the little train in the Jardin d’Acclimatation. Annie had taken us on it one afternoon. And we reached the endpoint of our journey, in that zone where Neuilly, Levallois, and Paris all blended together.

It was a street lined with trees, their leaves forming a vault. No dwellings, only warehouses and garages. We stopped in front of the largest and newest garage, with a tan pedimented façade.

Inside, a room was blocked off by glass-paneled walls. A man was waiting for us, with curly blond hair, sitting on a leather chair at a metal desk. He was Annie’s age. They spoke familiarly. He was dressed, like Jean D., in a plaid shirt, a suede windbreaker, a Canadienne in winter, and crepe-soled shoes. Privately, my brother and I used to call him “Buck Danny,” because I thought he looked like a character in an illustrated children’s book I was reading at the time.

What could Annie and Buck Danny have had to talk about? What could they have been up to when the office door was locked from the inside and an orange canvas shade came down over the windows? My brother and I would wander around the garage, which was even more mysterious than the great hall of the chateau abandoned by Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade. One by one we pondered the cars that were missing a fender, a hood, a rubber tire on a wheel. A man in overalls was lying under a convertible and repairing something with a monkey wrench; another, hose in hand, was filling the gas tank of a truck that had come to a halt with a terrible snorting of its engine. One day, we recognized Roger Vincent’s American car, its hood open, and we concluded that Buck Danny and Roger Vincent were friends.

Sometimes we’d go to meet Buck Danny at his home, in an apartment building on the boulevard, which I now think was Boulevard Berthier. We’d wait for Annie on the sidewalk. She came out with Buck Danny. We’d leave the 4CV parked in front of the building and walk, the four of us, to the garage, down narrow streets lined with trees and warehouses.

It was cool in the garage, and the smell of gasoline was stronger than the smell of cut grass or water when we sat by the mill wheel. The same kind of shadow floated over certain corners, where neglected cars slumbered. Their bodies shone dimly in that half-light, and I couldn’t stop looking at a metal plaque affixed to the wall, a yellow plaque on which I read a seven-letter name in black letters, the design and sound of which still move me even today: CASTROL.

One Thursday she took me alone in her 4CV. My brother had gone shopping with Little Hélène in Versailles. We parked in front of the apartment building where Buck Danny lived. But this time, she came back out without him.

At the garage, he wasn’t in his office. We got back into the 4CV and drove through the narrow streets of the quarter. We lost our way. We turned round and round in those streets that all looked alike, with their trees and their warehouses.

She finally stopped in front of a brick building, which I now suspect might have been the old Neuilly tollhouse. But what’s the use of trying to find the place? She turned around and stretched her arm toward the back seat, reaching for a Paris map and another object that she showed me and whose purpose I didn’t know: a brown crocodile-skin cigarette case.

“Here, Patoche, this is for you … It’ll come in handy later on.”

I contemplated the crocodile-skin case. It had a metal lining inside and contained two sweet-smelling cigarettes made of blond tobacco. I took them out of the case and, as I was about to thank her for the present and hand her back the two cigarettes, I saw her face, in profile. She was staring straight in front of her. A tear was falling down her cheek. I didn’t dare make a sound, and Frede’s nephew’s statement echoed in my head: “Annie cried all night long at Carroll’s.”

I fondled the cigarette case. I waited. She turned toward me and smiled.

“Do you like it?”

And, with an abrupt movement, she started up. She always made abrupt movements. She always wore men’s jackets and pants. Except at night. Her blond hair was very short. But there was such feminine softness about her, and such frailty … On the road back, I thought about her serious expression, when she sat with Jean D. in the 4CV under the rain.

I returned to that neighborhood, about twenty years ago, more or less around the time when I’d seen Jean D. again. For the month of July and the month of August, I lived in a tiny room beneath the eaves in Square de Graisivaudan. The sink touched the bed. The foot of the latter was just a few inches from the door and, to enter the room, you had to let yourself topple onto it. I was trying to finish my first book. I walked around the fringes of the sixteenth arrondissement, Neuilly, and Levallois, where Annie used to bring my brother and me on our days off from school. That whole ill-defined zone, which might or might not have still been Paris, and all those streets were wiped off the map when they built the périphérique, taking with them all their garages and their secrets.

I didn’t think once about Annie when I lived in that neighborhood that we’d driven through together so often. A more distant past haunted me, because of my father.

He had been arrested one February evening in a restaurant on Rue de Marignan. He didn’t have his identity papers on him. The police were conducting checks because of a new German regulation prohibiting Jews from being in public places after 8 P.M. He had taken advantage of the twilight and a momentary distraction on the detectives’ part at the Black Maria to make his escape.

The following year, they had apprehended him at home. They had taken him to a holding cell, then to an annex of the Drancy transit camp, in Paris, on the Quai de la Gare — a vast merchandise depot where all the Jewish belongings the Germans had looted were being stored: furniture, dishware, linens, toys, carpets, and artworks, arranged by level and section as if in a huge department store. The prisoners emptied the cases as they arrived and filled other cases heading for Germany.

One night, someone showed up in an automobile at the Quai de la Gare and had my father released. I imagined — rightly or wrongly — that it was a certain Louis Pagnon, whom they called “Eddy” and who was shot after the Liberation with members of the Rue Lauriston gang, to which he belonged.

Yes, someone got my father out of the “hole,” to use the expression he’d employed one evening when I was fifteen, when I was alone with him and he’d strayed very close to confiding a few things. I felt, that evening, that he would have liked to hand me down his experience of the murky and painful episodes in his life, but that he couldn’t find the words. Was it Pagnon or someone else? I needed answers to my questions. What possible connection could there have been between that man and my father? A chance encounter before the war? In the period when I lived in Square de Graisivaudan, I tried to elucidate the mystery by attempting to track down Pagnon. I had gotten authorization to consult the old archives. He was born in Paris, in the tenth arrondissement, between République and the Canal Saint-Martin. My father had also spent his childhood in the tenth arrondissement, but a bit farther over, near the Cité d’Hauteville. Had they met in school? In 1932, Pagnon had received a light sentence from the court of Mont-de-Marsan for “operating a gambling parlor.” Between 1937 and 1939, he had worked in a garage in the seventeenth arrondissement. He had known a certain Henri, a sales representative for Simca automobiles, who lived near the Porte des Lilas, and someone named Edmond Delehaye, a foreman at the Savary auto repair in Aubervilliers. The three men got together often; all three worked with cars. The war came, and the Occupation. Henri started a black market operation. Edmond Delehaye acted as his secretary, and Pagnon as driver. They set up shop in a private hotel on Rue Lauriston, near Place de l’Etoile, with a few other unsavory individuals. Those hoods — to use my father’s expression — slowly got sucked into the system: from black marketeering, they’d moved into doing the police’s dirty work for the Germans.

Pagnon had been involved in a smuggling case that the police report called “the Biarritz stockings affair.” It concerned a large quantity of socks that Pagnon collected from various black marketeers in the area. He bundled them in packs of a dozen and dropped them off near the Bayonne train station. They had filled six boxcars with them. In the deserted Paris of the Occupation years, Pagnon drove a fancy car, owned a racehorse, lived in a luxurious furnished apartment on Rue des Belles-Feuilles, and had the wife of a marquis for a mistress. With her, he frequented the riding club in Neuilly, Barbizon, the Fruit Défendu restaurant in Bougival … When had my father met Pagnon? At the time of the Biarritz stockings affair? Who can say? One afternoon in 1939, in the seventeenth arrondissement, my father had stopped at a garage to have a tire changed on his Ford, and there was Pagnon. They had chatted awhile; maybe Pagnon had asked him for a favor or some advice. They’d gone off to have a drink at a nearby café with Henri and Edmond Delahaye … One meets the strangest people in one’s life.

I had hung around the Porte des Lilas, hoping there was still someone who remembered a Simca dealer who’d lived near there around 1939. A certain Henri. But no, it didn’t ring any bells for anyone. In Aubervilliers, on Avenue Jean-Jaurès, the Savary repair shop that had employed Edmond Delahaye was long gone. And the garage in the seventeenth arrondissement where Pagnon worked? If I managed to track it down, an old mechanic might tell me about Pagnon and — I hoped — my father. And I would finally know everything I needed to know, everything my father knew.

I had drawn up a list of garages in the seventeenth, preferably those located at the edge of the arrondissement. I had an intuition that Pagnon had worked in one of these:

Garage des Réservoirs

Société Ancienne du Garage-Auto-Star

Van Zon

Vicar and Co.

Villa de l’Auto

Garage Côte d’Azur

Garage Caroline

Champerret-Marly-Automobiles

Cristal Garage

De Korsak

Eden Garage

L’Etoile du Nord

Auto-Sport Garage

Garage Franco-Américain

S.O.C.O.V.A.

Majestic Automobiles

Garage des Villas

Auto-Lux

Garage Saint-Pierre

Garage de la Comète

Garage Bleu

Matford-Automobiles

Diak

Garage du Bois des Caures

As Garage

Dixmude-Palace-Auto

Buffalo-Transports

Duvivier (R) S.A.R.L.

Autos-Remises

Lancien Frère

Garage aux Docks de la Jonquière

Today, I tell myself that the garage where Annie brought me and my brother must be on that list. Perhaps it was the same as Pagnon’s. I can still see the leaves on the trees lining the sidewalks, the wide tan pedimented façade … They tore it down with the others, and all those years have become, for me, nothing but a long and vain search for a lost garage.

Annie took me to another area of Paris that I later had no trouble recognizing: Avenue Junot, in Montmartre. She parked the 4CV in front of a small white building with a glass-paneled door made of cast iron. She told me to wait. She wouldn’t be long. She went into the building.

I walked down the avenue. Perhaps the liking I’ve always had for that neighborhood comes from then. A sharply vertical flight of steps led to another street below, and I had fun going down it. I walked for a few yards on Rue Caulaincourt, but I never strayed too far. I went back up the steps quickly, afraid that Annie would drive away in her 4CV and leave me behind.

But she wasn’t there yet and I had to wait some more, the way we used to wait in the garage, when the orange shade was drawn behind the window of Buck Danny’s office. She came out of the building with Roger Vincent. He smiled at me. He pretended to be running into me by chance.

“Well, what do you know … Fancy meeting you here!”

For days afterward, he would say to Andrée K., Jean D., or Little Hélène:

“It’s funny … I ran into Patoche in Montmartre … I wonder what he could have been doing there …”

And he turned to me:

“Don’t breathe a word. The less you say, the better.”

On Avenue Junot, Annie kissed him. She called him “Roger Vincent” and used the formal vous, but she kissed him.

“Someday I’ll have you up to my place,” Roger Vincent said to me. “I live here.”

And he pointed to the cast-iron front door of the small white building.

The three of us strolled along the sidewalk. His American car wasn’t parked in front of his building and I asked him why.

“I keep it in the garage across the way.”

We walked past the Hôtel Alsina, near the flight of steps. One time, Annie said:

“That’s where I lived, at first, with Little Hélène and Mathilde … You should have seen the face Mathilde used to make …”

Roger Vincent smiled. And I, without realizing it, absorbed everything they said and their words were etched in my memory.

Much later, I married and lived in that neighborhood for a few years. Almost every day I walked up Avenue Junot. One afternoon, something just came over me: I pushed open the glass-paneled door of the white building. I rang at the concierge’s lodge. A red-haired man stuck his head through the opening.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for someone who lived in this building, about twenty years ago …”

“Oh, well, I wasn’t here then, Monsieur.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know how I might get some information about him?”

“Go ask at the garage across the street. They used to know everybody.”

But I didn’t go ask at the garage across the street. I had spent so many years looking for garages in Paris that I no longer believed in them.

In summer the days grew longer, and Annie, who wasn’t as strict as Snow White, let us play in the evening in the gently sloping avenue in front of the house. On those evenings we didn’t wear our bathrobes. After dinner, Annie walked us to the door and gave me her wristwatch:

“You can play until nine-thirty. At nine-thirty, you’re to come in. Keep an eye on the time, Patoche — I’m counting on you.”

When Jean D. was there, he would lend me his huge watch. He set it so that at precisely nine-thirty, a little bell — like on an alarm clock — would tell us it was time to go back inside.

The two of us walked down the avenue to the main road where the occasional car was still passing by. A hundred yards away to the right was the train station, a small, weather-beaten, half-timbered structure that looked like a seaside villa. In front of it, a deserted esplanade bordered by trees and the Café de la Gare.

One Thursday, my father didn’t come by car with a friend but by train. At the end of the afternoon, the two of us accompanied him to the station. And since we were early, he took us to the terrace of the Café de la Gare. My brother and I had Coca-Colas, and he a brandy.

He had paid the bill and stood up to go catch his train. Before leaving us, he said:

“Don’t forget … If by chance you see the marquis de Caussade at the chateau, be sure to tell him Albert says hello.”

At the corner of the main road and the avenue, protected by a clump of privet hedges, we spied on the station. From time to time, a group of travelers emerged and fanned out toward the town, the water mill on the Bièvre, the Food Hamlet. The travelers grew increasingly scarce. Soon, only one person was left in the esplanade. The marquis de Caussade? That night, for sure, we’d have our big adventure and go up to the chateau. But we knew perfectly well that the plan would always be put off until tomorrow.

We stood still for a long time in front of the hedges that protected the Robin des Bois inn. We eavesdropped on the conversations of diners seated at the tables in the garden. The hedges concealed them, but their voices were very near. We could hear the tinkling of silverware, the waiters’ steps crunching on the gravel. The aroma of certain dishes mixed with the scent of privet. But the latter was stronger. The entire avenue smelled like privet.

Up ahead, a light went on in the bow window of the living room. Roger Vincent’s American car was parked in front of the house. That evening, he’d come with Andrée K., “the wife of the big-shot doctor,” the one who’d been part of the Rue Lauriston gang and who used tu with Roger Vincent. It wasn’t nine-thirty yet, but Annie emerged from the house, her light blue dress belted at the waist. We crossed the avenue again, as fast as possible, crouching low, and hid behind the bushes of the wooded area next to the Protestant temple. Annie came closer. Her blond hair formed a stain on the twilight. We could hear her footsteps. She was trying to find us. It was a game we played. Each time, we hid in a different spot, in the abandoned lot that the trees and vegetation had taken over. She always ended up finding our hiding place, because we would break out in hysterical laughter when she got too close. The three of us went back to the house. She was a child, like us.

Some sentences remain etched in your mind forever. One afternoon there was a kind of fair in the yard of the Protestant temple, across from the house. From our bedroom window, we had a plunging view of the little stalls around which children crowded with their parents. At lunch, Mathilde had said to me:

“How would you like to go to the festival at the temple, blissful idiot?”

She took us. We bought a lottery ticket and won two packets of nougat. On the way back, Mathilde said:

“They let you in because I’m a Protestant, blissful idiot!”

She was stern as ever, wearing her cameo and black dress.

“And let’s get one thing straight: Protestants see everything! There’s nothing you can hide from them! They don’t only have two eyes — they also have one in the back of their heads! You got that?”

She pointed to her bun.

“You got that, blissful idiot? An eye in the back of our heads!”

From then on, my brother and I felt nervous in her presence, especially when we were passing behind her back. It took me a long time to realize that Protestants were just like anyone else and not to cross the street when I saw one coming.

Never will another sentence have the same resonance for us. It was like Roger Vincent’s smile: I’ve never met one like it. Even in Roger Vincent’s absence, that smile floated in the air. I also remember a sentence that Jean D. said. One morning, he had taken me on his motorcycle up to the Versailles road. He wasn’t going too fast, and I held on to his Canadienne. On the way back, we stopped at the Robin des Bois inn to buy some cigarettes. The manageress was alone at the bar, a very pretty young blonde who wasn’t the one my father had known, back when he’d frequented the inn with Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade, and perhaps with Eddy Pagnon.

“A pack of Baltos,” Jean D. said.

The manageress handed him the pack of cigarettes, flashing both of us a smile. When we left the inn, Jean D. said to me in a serious voice:

“You know, old man … Women … They seem great from a distance, but up close, you’ve got to watch yourself.”

He suddenly looked very sad.

One Thursday we were playing on the knoll near the chateau. Little Hélène was watching us, sitting on the bench where Snow White normally sat. We climbed up the branches of the pine trees. I had climbed too high and, while moving from one branch to the next, I nearly fell. When I climbed down from the tree, Little Hélène was pale as a ghost. That day she was wearing her riding breeches and her mother-of-pearl bolero jacket.

“That wasn’t smart … You could have been killed!”

I had never heard her use such a harsh tone.

“Don’t ever do that again!”

I was so unused to seeing her angry that I felt like crying.

“I had to give up my career because of a stupid stunt like that.”

She took me by the shoulder and yanked me to the stone bench under the trees. She made me sit down. She took a crocodile-skin wallet from the inside pocket of her bolero jacket — the same color as the cigarette case Annie had given me, presumably from the same store. And from that wallet, she extracted a piece of paper and handed it to me.

“You know how to read?”

It was a newspaper clipping with a photo. I read the headline: TRAPEZE ARTIST HÉLÈNE TOCH IN SERIOUS ACCIDENT. MUSTAPHA AMAR AT HER BEDSIDE. She took back the clipping and returned it to her wallet.

“Accidents can happen very suddenly in life … I used to be like you — clueless … I was very trusting.”

She seemed to have second thoughts about talking to me in such an adult way.

“Come on, let’s go have a snack. We’ll get something at the pastry shop …”

All along Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, I hung back a bit to watch her walk. She had a slight limp. It had never occurred to me before then that she hadn’t always limped. So, accidents could happen in life. That revelation troubled me deeply.

The afternoon when I’d gone to Paris alone in Annie’s 4CV and she had given me the crocodile cigarette case, we had eventually found our way through the small streets, now demolished, of the seventeenth arrondissement. We followed the quays along the Seine, as usual. We stopped for a moment on the riverbank near Neuilly and the Ile de Puteaux. From the top of the wooden stairs that led to the light-colored pontoons, we gazed over the floating houses and barges converted into apartments.

“We’re going to have to move soon, Patoche … And this is where I want to live …”

She had already mentioned this to us, several times. We were a bit worried at the prospect of leaving the house and our town. But to live on one of those barges … Day after day, we waited to set off on this new adventure.

“We’ll make a room for the two of you. With portholes … We’ll have a big living room and a bar …”

She was musing aloud. We got back into the 4CV. After the Saint-Cloud tunnel, on the highway, she turned toward me. She looked at me with eyes that shone even brighter than usual.

“You know what you should do? Every evening, you should write down what you did that day. I’ll buy you a special notebook …”

It was a good idea. I stuck my hand in my pocket to reassure myself I still had the cigarette case.

Certain objects disappear from your life at the first lapse in attention, but that cigarette case has remained. I knew it would always be within reach, in a nightstand drawer, on a shelf in a clothes closet, at the back of a desk, in the inner pocket of a jacket. I was so sure of it, of its presence, that I usually forgot all about it. Except when I was feeling down. Then I would ponder it from every angle. It was the only object that bore witness to a period of my life I couldn’t talk to anyone about, and whose very reality I sometimes doubted.

Still, I almost lost it one day. I was in one of those schools where I bided my time until the age of seventeen. My cigarette case caught the eye of two twin brothers from the upper bourgeoisie. They had loads of cousins in the other grades, and their father bore the title “top marksman in France.” If they all banded against me, I wouldn’t stand a chance.

The only way to escape them was to get myself expelled as fast as possible. I ran away one morning, and I took the opportunity to visit Chantilly, Mortefontaine, Ermenonville, and the Abbey of Chaalis. I returned to school at dinnertime. The principal announced my expulsion but he couldn’t reach my parents. My father had left for Colombia some time before, to check out a silver mine a friend had told him about; my mother was on tour near La Chaux-de-Fonds. They quarantined me in a room in the nurse’s station until someone could come collect me. I wasn’t allowed to go to class or take my meals in the dining hall with my schoolmates. This kind of diplomatic immunity kept me safe from the two brothers, their cousins, and the top marksman in France. Every night before going to sleep, I verified the presence under my pillow of the crocodile cigarette case.

The object drew attention to itself one more time, a few years later. I had ended up taking Annie’s advice to write in a notebook, every day: I had just finished my first novel. I was sitting at the bar of a café on Avenue de Wagram. Next to me stood a man of about sixty with black hair, wearing glasses with very slender frames, whose appearance was as immaculate as his hands. For several minutes I’d been watching him, wondering what he did in life.

He had asked the waiter for a pack of cigarettes, but they didn’t sell any in that café. I offered my crocodile-skin case.

“Much obliged, Monsieur.”

He extracted a cigarette. His gaze remained fixed on the crocodile case.

“May I?”

He plucked it from my hand and turned it over and over, knitting his brow.

“I used to have the same one.”

He handed it back and looked at me more closely.

“They stole our entire stock of this item. Afterward we stopped carrying it. You have here a very rare collector’s item …”

He smiled. He had managed a fine leather goods shop on the Champs-Elysées, but was now retired.

“They weren’t satisfied with just those cases. They emptied the entire store.”

He leaned his face closer to mine, still smiling.

“You needn’t think I suspect you in the slightest … You would have been too young at the time.”

“Was it that long ago?” I asked.

“A good fifteen years.”

“And were they ever caught?”

“Not all of them. Those people had done things much more serious than breaking and entering.”

Things much more serious. I already knew those words. The trapeze artist Hélène Toch in a SERIOUS ACCIDENT. And later, the young man with large blue eyes had told me: SOMETHING VERY SERIOUS.

Outside, on Avenue de Wagram, I walked with a curious euphoria in my heart. It was the first time in a long while that I felt Annie’s presence. She was walking behind me that evening. Roger Vincent and Little Hélène must also have been somewhere in the city. In the final account, they had never left me.

Snow White disappeared for good without giving notice. At lunch, Mathilde said:

“She left because she couldn’t stand looking after you, blissful idiot!”

Annie shrugged her shoulders and winked at me.

“That’s a stupid thing to say, Mom! She left because she had to go back to her family.”

Mathilde squinted and gave her daughter a nasty look.

“You don’t talk to your mother that way in front of the children!”

Annie pretended not to listen. She smiled at us.

“Did you hear me?” Mathilde said to her daughter. “You’ll come to a bad end, just like Blissful Idiot here!”

Annie shrugged again.

“Take it easy, Thilda,” said Little Hélène.

Mathilde looked at me and pointed to the bun on the back of her head.

“You know what that means, don’t you? Now that Snow White is gone, I’ll be looking after you, blissful idiot!”

Annie walked me to school. She had put her hand on my shoulder, as usual.

“Don’t pay any attention to what Mom says … She’s old. Old people talk nonsense.”

We had arrived early. We waited in front of the iron gate to the playground.

“You and your brother are going to sleep for a night or two in the house across the street … you know, the white one. We’re having some people come live at our house for a few days …”

She must have noticed my worried look.

“And anyway, I’ll be staying with you … You’ll see, it’ll be fun.”

In class, I couldn’t concentrate on the lesson. My mind was elsewhere. Snow White had gone, and now we were going to live in the house across the street.

After school, Annie took my brother and me to the house across the street. She rang at the small door that opened onto Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. A brown-haired woman, rather corpulent and dressed in black, opened for us. She was the housekeeper, as the owners of the place never lived there.

“The room’s all ready,” said the housekeeper.

We went up a flight of stairs lit by electric lights. All the shutters in the house were closed. We followed a hallway. The housekeeper opened a door. The room was larger than ours, and there were two beds with brass bars, two grown-up beds. The walls were covered in light blue patterned wallpaper. A window looked out onto Rue du Docteur-Dordaine: those shutters were open.

“You’ll like it here, kids,” said Annie.

The housekeeper smiled at us. She said:

“I’ll make you breakfast in the morning.”

We went back down the stairs, and the housekeeper showed us the ground floor of the house. In the large living room, with its closed shutters, two crystal chandeliers shone bright enough to blind us. The furniture was cased in transparent slipcovers. Except for the piano.

After dinner, we went out with Annie. We were wearing our pajamas and our bathrobes. A spring evening. It was fun to wear our bathrobes outside, and we walked down the avenue with Annie, all the way to the Robin des Bois inn. We wished we would run into someone so they’d see us walking around in our bathrobes.

We rang at the door of the house across the street and, once again, the housekeeper opened up and took us to our room. We got into the beds with the brass bars. The housekeeper told us her bedroom was downstairs, next to the living room, and we could call her if there was anything we needed.

“And anyway, Patoche, I’m right nearby,” said Annie.

She gave us each a kiss on the forehead. We had already brushed our teeth after dinner, in our real room. The housekeeper closed the shutters and turned off the light, and the two of them went out.

That first night, we talked for a long time, my brother and I. We would have loved to go downstairs to the living room on the ground floor to look at the chandeliers, the chairs in their slipcases, and the piano, but we were afraid the wood of the staircase would creak and the housekeeper would scold us.

The next morning was Thursday. I had no school. The housekeeper brought us breakfast in our room, on a tray. We said thank you.

Frede’s nephew didn’t come that Thursday. We stayed in the large garden, near the façade of the house with its French doors and closed shutters. There was a weeping willow and, way in back, a bamboo wall through which we could make out the terrace of the Robin des Bois inn and the tables that the waiters were setting for dinner. We ate sandwiches at noon. The housekeeper made them for us. We were sitting in the garden chairs with our sandwiches, as if for a picnic. That evening the weather was warm, and we had dinner in the garden. The housekeeper had again made us ham and cheese sandwiches. Two apple tarts for dessert. And Coca-Cola.

Annie came round after dinner. We’d put on our pajamas and bathrobes. We went out with her. This time, we crossed the main road at the bottom of the hill. We met some people near the public garden, and they looked surprised to see us in our bathrobes. Annie was wearing her old leather jacket and her blue jeans. We walked past the train station. It occurred to me that we could take the train, in our bathrobes, all the way to Paris.

When we returned, Annie kissed us in the garden of the white house and gave each of us a harmonica.

I woke up in the middle of the night. I heard the rumble of a car engine. I got up and went to the window. The housekeeper hadn’t closed the shutters, just drawn the red curtains.

Across the street, a light was on in the bow window of the living room. Roger Vincent’s car was parked in front of the house, its black convertible top folded down. Annie’s 4CV was there too. But the sound of the motor came from a canvas-covered truck idling on the other side of the street, near the wall of the Protestant temple. The motor shut off. Two men came out of the truck. I recognized Jean D. and Buck Danny, and the two of them went into the house. Now and then I saw a silhouette pass in front of the bow window of the living room. I was sleepy. The next morning, the housekeeper woke us carrying the tray with our breakfast. She and my brother took me to school. On Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, there was no sign of the truck or Roger Vincent’s car. But Annie’s 4CV was still there, in front of the house.

When I got out of school, my brother was waiting for me all alone.

“There’s nobody home at our house.”

He told me the housekeeper had brought him back to the house a little while ago. Annie’s 4CV was there, but no one was home. The housekeeper had to go do the shopping in Versailles until late that afternoon and she had left my brother at the house, telling him that Annie would be back soon since her car was there. My brother had sat in the empty house, waiting.

He looked happy to see me. He even laughed, like someone who had been afraid but was now relieved.

“They just went to Paris,” I reassured him. “Don’t you worry.”

We walked up Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. Annie’s 4CV was there.

Nobody in the dining room or the kitchen. Or the living room. Upstairs, Annie’s room was empty. Little Hélène’s as well. So was Mathilde’s, in the back of the courtyard. We went into Snow White’s room: maybe she had come back after all. But no. It was as if no one had ever lived in those rooms. Through the window of our bedroom, I stared down at Annie’s 4CV.

The silence in the house was frightening. I turned on the radio and we ate the two apples and two bananas that remained in the fruit basket, on the sideboard. I opened the back door. The green bumper car was still there, in the middle of the courtyard.

“We’ll wait for them,” I said to my brother.

Time passed. The hands on the kitchen clock said twenty minutes to two. It was time to go back to school. But I couldn’t leave my brother all alone. We sat down, facing each other, at the dining room table. We listened to the radio.

We went outside. Annie’s 4CV was still there. I opened one of the doors and sat in the front seat, in my usual spot. I rifled through the glove compartment and carefully inspected the back seat. Nothing. Except an empty cigarette pack.

“Let’s walk up to the chateau,” I said to my brother.

The wind was blowing. We walked along Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. My friends were already back in school, and the teacher would have noticed my absence. The more we walked, the deeper the silence grew around us. Beneath the sun, that street and all its houses seemed deserted.

The wind gently ruffled the tall grass in the meadow. The two of us had never ventured here alone. The boarded-up windows of the chateau provoked the same anxiety in me as in the evenings, coming back from our walks in the woods with Snow White. The chateau façade was dark and threatening in those moments. As it was now, in midafternoon.

We sat down on the bench, where Snow White and Little Hélène used to sit back when we climbed the branches of the pine trees. The silence still hovered around us, and I tried to play a tune on the harmonica Annie had given me.

On Rue du Docteur-Dordaine, we saw, from afar, a black car parked in front of the house. A man was at the wheel, his leg sticking out from the open driver’s-side door, and he was reading the newspaper. At the door to the house, a gendarme in uniform stood very stiff, with a bare head. He was young, with short-cropped blond hair, and his big blue eyes stared into the void.

He started and looked at my brother and me, his eyes wide.

“What are you doing here?”

“This is my house,” I said. “Has something happened?”

“Something very serious.”

I felt afraid. But his voice was trembling a bit as well. A truck with a crane turned the corner of the avenue. A bunch of gendarmes hopped out and attached Annie’s 4CV to the crane. Then the truck started up again, slowly towing Annie’s 4CV behind it down Rue du Docteur-Dordaine. That was the part that hit me hardest and made me feel the worst.

“It’s very serious,” he said. “You can’t go in.”

But we did go in. Someone was on the phone in the living room. A dark-haired man in a gabardine coat was sitting on the edge of the dining room table. He saw my brother and me and came toward us.

“Ah … Are you them? … The children …?”

He repeated:

“Are you the children?”

He pulled us into the living room. The man on the phone hung up. He was short with very wide shoulders, and he wore a black leather jacket. He said, like the other one:

“Ah … It’s the children.”

He said to the man in the gabardine coat:

“You’ll have to take them to headquarters in Versailles. Nobody’s answering in Paris …”

Something very serious, the gendarme with the big blue eyes had said. I remembered the newspaper clipping that Little Hélène kept in her wallet: TRAPEZE ARTIST HÉLÈNE TOCH IN SERIOUS ACCIDENT. I kept behind her to watch her walk. She hadn’t always had that limp.

“Where are your parents?” the dark-haired man in the gabardine coat asked me.

I tried to find an answer. It was too complicated to explain. Annie had said so, the day when we’d gone together to see the principal of the Jeanne d’Arc school and she’d pretended to be my mother.

“Don’t you know where your parents are?”

My mother was acting in her play somewhere in North Africa. My father was in Brazzaville or Bangui, or somewhere farther still. It was too complicated.

“They’re dead,” I told him.

He flinched. He looked at me, knitting his brow. It was as if he was suddenly afraid of me. The short man in the leather jacket stared at me as well, with worried eyes, his lips parted. Two gendarmes entered the living room.

“Should we keep searching the house?” one of them asked the dark-haired man in the gabardine coat.

“Yes, yes … Keep searching …”

They left. The dark-haired man in the gabardine coat leaned toward us.

“Go play in the garden,” he said in a very gentle voice. “I’ll come see you in a little bit.”

He took each of us by the hand and led us outside. The green bumper car was still there. He stretched out his arm toward the garden:

“Go play … I’ll see you in a little bit.”

And he went back inside the house.

We climbed the stone steps to the first terrace of the garden, where the grave of Doctor Guillotin was hidden under the clematis and Mathilde had planted a rose bush. The window to Annie’s room was wide open, and since we were level with that window, I could see that they were searching everything in Annie’s room.

Lower down, the short man in the black leather jacket was crossing the courtyard, holding a flashlight. He leaned over the edge of the well, pushed aside the honeysuckle and strained to see something down at the bottom, with his flashlight. The others continued rummaging through Annie’s room. Still others arrived, gendarmes and men wearing everyday clothes. They searched everywhere, even inside our bumper car; they walked around the courtyard, appeared in the windows of the house, and called to each other in loud voices. And my brother and I, we pretended to play in the garden, waiting for someone to come collect us.