The Black Maria followed Rue des Saints-Pères, then Boulevard Saint-Germain. It stopped at a red light in front of the Deux Magots. We arrived at the police station on Rue de l’Abbaye. My father pressed charges with the superintendent. He called me a “hooligan” and said I’d come up to his place to “make trouble.” The superintendent declared that the “next time” he’d keep me there. I could tell my father would have been perfectly content to leave me at that police station once and for all. We returned together to the Quai de Conti. I asked why he’d let the ersatz Mylène Demongeot call the police and why he’d pressed charges. He said nothing.
That same year, 1965—or perhaps 1964—my father demolished the inner staircase connecting the two floors, and the apartments were separated for good. When I opened the door and stood in the small room filled with rubble, I found some of our childhood books, along with postcards addressed to my brother that had remained on the fourth floor, there among the debris, torn in pieces. May and June. Still in Montmartre. It was nice out. I was at a café on Rue des Abbesses, in the springtime.
July. Night train, standing in the corridor. Vienna. I spend a few nights in a seedy hotel near the Westbahnhof. Then I hole up in a room behind the Karlskirche. I meet all sorts of people at the Café Hawelka. One evening, I celebrate my twentieth birthday with them.
We sunbathed in the gardens of Potzleinsdorf, and also in a little shack in a working-class allotment near Heiligenstadt. The Café Rabe, a gloomy beer hall near the Graben, was always empty and you could listen to songs by Piaf. And still that slight giddiness mixed with lethargy, in the summer streets, as if after a sleepless night.
Sometimes we went up to the Czech and Hungarian borders. A large field. Watchtowers. If you walked in the field, they would fire at you.
I left Vienna at the beginning of September. Sag’ beim Abschied leise “Servus,” as the song goes. A passage by our Joseph Roth calls to mind the city I haven’t seen in forty years. Will I ever see it again? “You had to grab these shy, fleeting evenings before they disappeared, and what I liked best was to catch them in the parks, the Volksgarten or the Prater, and then to savor the last sweetest lingering of them in a café, where they seeped in, gentle and mild, like a fragrance …”
Night train in second class, at the Westbahnhof, Vienna to Geneva. I arrived in Geneva at the end of the afternoon. I caught the bus for Annecy. In Annecy, night had fallen. It was pouring. I was broke. I went into the Hôtel d’Angleterre on Rue Royale, with no idea how I’d pay for a room. I no longer recognized Annecy, which that evening was a ghost town in the rain. They had demolished the old hotel and derelict buildings near the station. The next day, I ran across some friends. Many had already left for military service. That evening, I thought I saw them pass by in the rain in uniform. As it turned out, I had fifty francs left. But the Hôtel d’Angleterre was expensive. During those few days, I had gone to the Collège Saint-Joseph in Thônes to visit my old literature teacher, Father Accambray. I had written him from Vienna, asking whether they might hire me as a proctor or assistant teacher for the coming year. I think I was trying to avoid Paris and my poor parents, who had given me no moral support whatsoever and had left me with my back to the wall. I’ve found two letters from Father Accambray: “I’d love it if the school year could start with you as a teacher in our house. I’ve spoken with the Superior. The teaching staff is full, but there could possibly be some movement before the end of August, which I hope will happen so that you can join us.” In the second, dated September 7, 1965, he writes: “The teaching schedule on which I’ve been working these past few days clearly shows, alas, that we have more than enough staff for the 1965–66 school year. We simply can’t offer you any work, even part-time …”
But life continued with no clear sense of why at a given moment you found yourself with certain individuals rather than others, in certain places rather than others, and whether the film was in the original language or dubbed. These days, all that remain in my memory are brief sequences. I enrolled in the Faculty of Literature to prolong my military deferment. I never went to classes and was a phantom student. Jean Normand (alias Jean Duval) came to live at Quai de Conti for several months, in the small room that had once contained the inner staircase connecting the third and fourth floors. He worked in a real estate office but was persona non grata in Paris. That’s something I would learn later. My mother had met him around 1955. Normand was twenty-seven then and had just served time in prison for burglary. As it happened, he had committed some of those burglaries, while still very young, with Suzanne Bouquerau, the woman my brother and I lived with in Jouy-en-Josas. He must have gone back to jail since then, as he was in Poissy prison in 1959. He made some basic restorations to the dilapidated room and I’m sure he gave my mother money. I was very fond of this Normand (alias Duval). One evening, he quietly left a hundred-franc bill on the mantelpiece of my room, which I discovered only after he’d gone. He drove a Jaguar, and the following year, at the time of the Ben Barka Affair, I read in the papers that they’d nicknamed him “the tall man with the Jaguar.”
An incident, from 1965 or ’66: It’s ten o’clock at night and I’m alone in the apartment. I hear heavy footsteps upstairs, at my father’s, and the crash of furniture being knocked over and windows being smashed. Then silence. I open the door to the landing. Coming from the fourth floor, two stocky fellows who look like thugs or plainclothes cops hurtle down the stairs. I ask them what’s going on. One of them makes an authoritarian gesture and tells me sharply to “go back inside.” I hear footfalls in my father’s apartment. So he was there … I’m tempted to phone him, but we haven’t seen each other since our trip to Bordeaux, and I’m certain he’ll hang up. Two years later, I ask him what happened that night. He claims not to know what I’m talking about. I believe that man could have worn down ten examining magistrates.
That autumn of 1965, on evenings when I had a few five-franc bills bearing the likeness of Victor Hugo, I patronized a restaurant near the Lutèce theater. And I hid out in a room on Avenue Félix-Faure in the 15th arrondissement, where a friend was storing a ten-year collection of Paris-Turf: he used them to make arcane statistical calculations for his bets at Auteuil and Longchamp. Pie in the sky. And yet I remember finding my bearings in that Grenelle neighborhood, thanks to those razor-straight backstreets that flowed down to the Seine. Sometimes I’d take a taxi very late at night. The ride cost five francs. At the edge of the 15th arrondissement, the police often checked for minors. I had altered the birthdate on my passport to give myself legal age, transforming 1945 into 1943.
Raymond Queneau was kind enough to receive me on Saturdays. Often, at the beginning of the afternoon, we’d return from Neuilly along the Left Bank. He told me of a walk he had taken with Boris Vian to a dead-end street that almost no one knew, at the far end of the 13th arrondissement, between the Quai de la Gare and the Austerlitz train tracks: Rue de la Croix-Jarry. He recommended I go there. I’ve read that the times Queneau was happiest were when he wandered around in the afternoon, thinking up his articles about Paris for L’Intransigeant. I wonder whether those dead years that I’m invoking here are worth it. Like Queneau, I was really myself only when I could be alone in the streets, seeking out curiosities like the Asnières dog cemetery. I had two dogs at the time. Their names were Jacques and Paul. In Jouy-en-Josas, in 1952, my brother and I had a dog called Peggy, who got run over one afternoon on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. Queneau was very fond of dogs.