“This is where I live.”
On the ground floor, we took a long hallway lit by neons. A silhouette in a raincoat was waiting at her door. A tall, dark man with a fine mustache. A cigarette was hanging from the corner of his mouth. He, too, was someone I’d seen around the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
“I didn’t have the key,” he said.
He smiled at me, looking mildly surprised.
“He’s a pal of mine,” she said, pointing to me.
“Nice to meet you.”
He shook my hand. She said to me:
“Go take a walk, old top … Come back in an hour … This evening, I’ll take you to a restaurant and afterward we’ll go to the movies …”
She opened her door and the two of them went in. Then she poked her head through the doorway.
“Don’t forget the number of the room when you come back. It’s 23 …”
With her finger she showed me the figure 23, in gilded metal on the pale wood.
“Come back in an hour … This evening, we’ll go have a good tuck-in in Montmartre, at the San Cristobal …”
Her Danish accent was even softer, more caressing because of the outdated slang expression.
She shut the door. For a moment, I stood frozen in the hall. It took a huge effort not to knock. I left the building and walked with slow, regular steps, for I could feel the panic rising in me. I thought I’d never manage to cross the traffic circle at Trocadéro. I talked myself out of entering the first police station I saw and confessing my crime. But no, it was absurd. They’d put me in a real reform school, or what they called a “supervised environment.” Could I really trust the Danish girl? I should have stayed on the sidewalk of Avenue Paul-Doumer, to make sure she didn’t leave. The dark-haired man in the raincoat who’d gone into her place might persuade her not to look after me. Room 23. I mustn’t forget the number. Still three-quarters of an hour to go. And if she wasn’t there, I’d wait for her at the door of her building, keeping out of sight until she returned.
I tried to reassure myself by tossing all those ideas around in my head. On the other side of the traffic circle was the stop for the 63 bus. Did I have enough time to ride as far as the Bois de Boulogne and back again? I still had ten francs. But I was scared at the thought of finding myself all alone on that bus, and all alone on the lawn at La Muette and next to the lake, those places where I’d used to go, only a few years before, with my brother. Instead I went onto the esplanade that overlooks Paris. Then I walked down the sloping alleys of the garden that were bathed in winter light. No one was around. I felt better. Above me were the huge windows and cornice of the Palais de Chaillot. It felt as if the auditoriums and galleries inside were as empty as the gardens. I went to sit on a bench. Almost at once, my immobility brought that panic back to the surface. So I stood up again and continued down the alleys, toward the Seine.
I ended up in front of the Aquarium. I bought a ticket. It was like going into a subway station. It was dark at the bottom of the steps, but that comforted me. In the room where I then found myself, only the tanks were lit. Little by little, in the bosom of those shadows, I regained my peace of mind. Nothing mattered. I was far removed from everything: my parents, my school, the commotion of life, in which the only good memory was that soft, murmuring voice with its Danish accent … I approached the tanks. The fish were as brightly colored as the bumper cars of my childhood: pink, turquoise, emerald … They made no noise. They slid along the glass partitions. They opened their mouths without emitting a sound, but now and again bubbles would rise to the surface of the water. They would never call me to account.
There, on the sidewalk of Avenue Henri-Martin, it occurred to me that Sunday evenings in winter are as depressing in the affluent west-side neighborhoods as they are around the Ursulines and on the glacial square of the Panthéon.
I felt pressure in the pit of my stomach, a flower whose petals swelled and became suffocating. I was pinned to the ground. Fortunately, the presence of my daughters kept me anchored in the present. Otherwise, all the old Sunday evenings, with their returns to boarding school, the crossing of the Bois de Boulogne, the long-gone Neuilly riding club, the night lights in the dormitory — those Sundays would have drowned me in their odor of rotting leaves. A few lit windows in the building façades were themselves night lights that had been left burning for thirty years, in empty apartments.
The memory of Jacqueline surged from the rain puddles and lights burning to no purpose in the apartment windows. I don’t know whether she’s still alive somewhere. The last time I saw her was twenty-four years ago, in the main departure hall of the Westbahnhof in Vienna. I was about to leave that city and return to Paris, but she’d decided to stay. She probably remained awhile longer in our room on the Taubstummengasse, behind the Karlskirche, and then I suppose that she, too, must have headed off for new adventures.
I wonder where certain people are today, whom I knew in that same period. I try to imagine in which city I might possibly run into them. I’m certain they’ve left Paris for good. And I think of Rome, where one finally ends up, and where time has stopped like on the clock in the Carrousel gardens in my childhood.
That summer, we’d found ourselves for several months in another foreign city, Vienna, and we were even planning to stay there forever. One night, near the Graben, we had gone into a café that one accessed through the main entrance of an apartment building. The foyer led to a large room with a grayish floor that looked like a dance school or the disused lobby of a hotel, or even a train station cafeteria. Light shone from neon tubes on the walls.
I had discovered this place by chance during a stroll. We sat at one of the tables arranged in rows, widely separated from each other. There were only three or four customers talking among themselves in low voices.
Of course, it was I who’d dragged Jacqueline to the Café Rabe that evening. But that girl, who was exactly my age, had a knack for attracting ghosts. In Paris, on the Sunday evening when I’d noticed her for the first time, she was in such strange company … And now, at the Café Rabe, who would we meet because of her?
A man came in. He was wearing a tweed jacket. He walked with a heavy limp to the counter at the back of the room, helped himself to a pitcher of water and a glass. With his broken gait, he came to sit at the table next to ours.
I wondered if he was the café owner. He must have overheard a few words of our conversation, for he turned toward us:
“Are you French?”
He had a very slight accent. He smiled. He introduced himself:
“Rudy Hiden …”
I had already heard that name without knowing whom it belonged to. His face with its regular features could have been a movie actor’s. At the time, his name, Rudy, had struck me: it was my brother’s name. And he evoked romantic images: Mayerling, Valentino’s funeral, an Austrian emperor who suffered from melancholia in some long-distant past.
We exchanged a few polite words with Rudy Hiden, like travelers who don’t know each other but happen to be sitting at the same table in the restaurant car. He told us he had lived in Paris, that he hadn’t been back in a long time, and that he missed the city very much. He bade us farewell with a ceremonious movement of his head when we left the Café Rabe.
Later, I learned that he’d been the greatest goalie in the history of soccer. I tried to find photos of him and of all his Austrian friends with melodious names who’d been on the Vienna Wunderteam, and who had dazzled the spectators in the stadiums with their grace. Rudy Hiden had had to quit soccer. He had opened a nightclub in Paris, on Rue Magellan. Then a bar on Rue de la Michodière. He had broken his leg. He had returned to Vienna, his native city, where he lived as a vagrant.