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.