Christmas 1962. I don’t remember whether there really was any snow that Christmas. In any case, in my mind I see it falling at night in heavy flakes on the road and the stables. I was met at the stud farm in Saint-Lô by Josée and Henri B. — Josée, the girl who used to look after me from ages eleven to fourteen, in my mother’s absence. Henri, her husband, was the farm veterinarian. They were my last resort.
Over the following years, I’d often return to their place in Saint-Lô. The city they called “capital of the ruins” had been flattened by bombardments during the Normandy invasion, and many survivors had lost all trace or proof of their identity. They were still rebuilding Saint-Lô into the 1950s. Near the stud farm, there was a zone of temporary workers’ huts. I would go to the Café du Balcon and the town library; sometimes Henri would take me to the neighboring farms, where he treated animals on call, even at night. And at night, thinking of all those horses standing guard around me or sleeping in their stalls, I was relieved that they, at least, would not be taken to the slaughterhouse, like the line of horses I had seen one morning at the Porte Brancion.
I made a few girlfriends in Saint-Lô. One lived at the power plant. Another, at eighteen, wanted to go to Paris and enroll in the Conservatory. She told me of her plans in a café near the train station. In the provinces, in Annecy, in Saint-Lô, it was still a time when every dream and nighttime stroll ended up at the station, where the train left for Paris.
I read Balzac’s Lost Illusions that Christmas of 1962. I was still living in the same room on the top floor of the house. Its window looked out onto the main road. I remember that every Sunday, at midnight, an Algerian walked up that road toward the workers’ huts, talking softly to himself. And this evening, forty years later, Saint-Lô reminds me of the lit window in The Crimson Curtain—as if I’d forgotten to turn off the light in my old room or in my youth. Barbey d’Aurevilly was born around there. I had once visited his former house.
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Nineteen sixty-three. Nineteen sixty-four. The years blend together. Days of indolence, days of rain … Still, I sometimes entered a trancelike state in which I escaped the drabness, a mixture of giddiness and lethargy, like when you walk the streets in springtime after being up all night.
Nineteen sixty-four. I met a girl named Catherine in a café on Boulevard de la Gare, and she had the same grace and Parisian accent as Arletty. I remember the spring that year. The leaves on the chestnut trees along the elevated metro. Boulevard de la Gare, its squat houses not yet demolished.
My mother got a bit part in a play by François Billetdoux at the Théâtre de l’Ambigu: Comment va le monde, môssieu? Il tourne, môssieu … Boris Vian’s widow, Ursula Kübler, was also in the cast. She drove a red Morgan. Sometimes I went to visit her and her friend Hot d’Déé in Cité Véron. She showed me how she used to do the “bear dance” with Boris Vian. It moved me to see the complete set of Boris Vian’s records.
In July, I took refuge in Saint-Lô. Idle afternoons. I frequented the town library and met a blonde. She was spending her holidays in a villa in the hills of Trouville, with her kids and dogs. During the Occupation, when she was fourteen, she had lived at the Legion of Honor school in Saint-Denis. A “schoolgirl of old boarding-schools.” My mother wrote me: “If you’re happy there, it would be best if you stayed as long as possible. I’m living on practically nothing, and this way I can send the rest of the money I owe Galeries Lafayette.”
In September, in Saint-Lô, another letter from my mother: “I don’t think we’ll have any heating this winter, but we’ll manage. So I need you, my son, to send me all the money you have left.” At the time, I made a modest living by “brokering” used books. And in still another letter, a hopeful note: “The coming winter surely won’t be as harsh as the one we’ve been through …”
I received a phone call from my father. He had enrolled me, without asking, in advanced literature courses at the Lycée Michel-Montaigne in Bordeaux. He was, he said, “in charge of my schooling.” He made an appointment with me for the following day, at the cafeteria of the railway station in Caen. We took the first train for Paris. At Saint-Lazare, the ersatz Mylène Demongeot was waiting for us and drove us to the Gare d’Austerlitz. I realized that she was the one who had insisted on my exile, far from Paris. My father asked me to give the ersatz Mylène Demongeot, as a token of reconciliation, an amethyst ring I was wearing, a parting gift from my friend, the “schoolgirl of old boarding schools.” I refused.
At the Gare d’Austerlitz, my father and I caught the train to Bordeaux. I had no luggage, as if I were being kidnapped. I’d agreed to leave with him in hopes of talking things over between us: it was the first time in two years we’d been alone together, other than those furtive meetings in cafés.
We arrived in Bordeaux that evening. My father took a room for the two of us at the Hôtel Splendide. The following days, we went to the shops on Rue Sainte-Catherine to buy my necessities for the school year — of which the Lycée Michel-Montaigne had sent my father a list. I tried to convince him that all this was pointless, but he stuck to his guns.
One evening, in front of the Grand Théâtre, I started running to try to lose him. And then I felt sorry for him. Again I tried to talk things over. Why was he always so eager to get rid of me? Wouldn’t it be simpler if I just stayed in Paris? I was too old to be shut up in boarding schools … He didn’t want to hear it. So then I pretended to give in. As before, we went to the movies … The Sunday evening before school began, he brought me to the Lycée Michel-Montaigne in a taxi. He gave me 150 francs and made me sign a receipt. Why? He waited in the taxi until I had disappeared through the front door of the school. I went up to the dormitory with my suitcase. The boarders treated me as a “new kid” and forced me to read aloud a text in Greek. So I decided to run away. I left the school with my suitcase and went to have dinner at the restaurant Dubern, on Allée de Tourny, where my father had taken me on the previous days. Then I took a cab to the Gare Saint-Jean. And a night train to Paris. There was nothing left of the 150 francs. I was sorry not to have seen more of Bordeaux, the city of The Unknown Sea; not to have breathed in the scent of pines and their resin. The next day, in Paris, I ran into my father on the stairs in our building. He was stunned to see me. We would not speak to each other for a long time after that.
And the days and months passed. And the seasons. Sometimes I’d like to go back in time and relive those years better than I lived them then. But how?
I now took Rue Championnet at the hour of the afternoon when the sun is in your eyes. I spent my days in Montmartre in a kind of waking dream. I felt better there than anywhere else. The metro stop Lamarck-Caulaincourt, with its rising elevator and the San Cristobal midway up the steps. The café at the Terrass Hôtel. For brief moments, I was happy. Get-togethers at 7 P.M. at the Rêve. The icy handrail on Rue Berthe. And me, always short of breath.
On Thursday, April 8, 1965, judging from an old diary, my mother and I didn’t have a cent. She forced me to go ring at my father’s door and demand some money. I climbed the stairs with a leaden heart. I’d intended not to ring, but my mother was glaring up at me from the landing, eyes and chin tragic, foaming at the mouth. I rang. He slammed the door in my face. I rang again. The ersatz Mylène Demongeot screamed that she was going to call the police. I went back down to the third floor. The police came for me. My father was with them. They made both of us climb into the Black Maria parked in front of the building, under the dumbfounded eyes of the concierge. We sat on the bench, side by side. He didn’t say a word to me. This was the first time in my life I found myself in a police van, and as it happened, it was with my father. He had already been through this before, in February 1942 and in the winter of 1943, when he’d been picked up by the French inspectors of the Jewish Affairs police.